5 Tips for Running a Successful Wellness Challenge


It doesn’t come as a surprise that employees experience burnout from time to time.

In fact, around 74% of the workforce believes their company needs to do more to combat burnout. An ‘always on’ work culture has turned some professionals into bleary-eyed balls of stress, with high-performing employees suffering a “passion tax” at the hands of their managers.

Remote and hybrid working also means that employees are generally getting out less and staring at screens more. And that’s to be expected. But with nearly half (48%) of Americans prioritizing their physical fitness, this opens up a broader conversation about employee health and wellbeing.

Although it’s not a new concept, only one in four US employees believe their organization cares about their overall wellbeing. So how can you boost your employee’s wellbeing and turn it into engagement?

Read on for five actionable steps to running your own successful wellness challenge and tips on how to get started and boost participation.

company-culture-2

A Wellness Challenge at a Glance: The Basics

A wellness challenge can take on many shapes and sizes, and what’s right for one organization may not be right for yours. Whatever your goals for your wellness challenge, there are a few key aspects you’ll want to consider before you get started.

Timeline: Keep it Focused

The best challenge is one that can be measured. You want your time frame to be long enough to be challenging, but not so long that participants lose interest or become unmotivated. For example, your challenge might last a few weeks. One workweek is probably too short, and anything longer than a quarter risks going overboard.

You also want the goals and objectives to be clear and focused. What do you hope your company achieves with this wellness challenge? To better understand your goals, consider the kind of feedback you’d like to receive from your employees. Do you hope to see less employee burnout? More workplace positivity?

Stay focused in your time frame, goals, and framework, and you’re on the right track.

Points: Reward Participation

Any good challenge has rewards. Whether your wellness challenge takes the form of a company-wide competition or employee-set, individual goals, you’ll want some way to keep track of progress to keep your reward system transparent.

We recommend using a point system, where different activities earn a certain number of points.

Activities: Be Specific, Yet Flexible

Be specific in the kinds of activities that qualify as “high impact,” “medium impact,” or “low impact” within your point system. That might look something like this:

High-Impact Activities

Medium-Impact Activities

Low-Impact Activities:

Communication: Connection & Accountability

Before you get started, consider how you’ll encourage participation, boost participants’ motivation, and stay connected as accountability partners and cheerleaders throughout the challenge.

It’s a good idea to use a platform your workforce is familiar and comfortable with, and that won’t get confused with essential work communications or lost in their inbox. Consider creating a Slack channel, Microsoft Team, or other communication platform to keep everyone up-to-date and in the loop.

company-culture-4

5 Tips for Running A Wellness Challenge Employees Will Love

Setting up a wellness challenge in your organization is a wonderful idea, particularly for adopting healthy behaviors and motivating co-workers. We covered what you might want to consider before getting started, but now you’re ready to dive in to a challenge of your own. Here are our five top tips for running a challenge employees will love.

1. Select a Specific Timeframe

People tend to struggle with commitment when a challenge or project is open-ended. This is why work projects tend to have specific deliverables—the target keeps everyone on task and focused on getting it done. It’s no different with a company wellness challenge. If you simply start up a challenge with no end date in sight, your team might decide to wait and jump in later or just dismiss it entirely.

Decide on a start and end date for the challenge, and let everyone know well in advance. Some people might want to do a little prep before the challenge starts, such as buying a new pair of shoes if they are going to walk or run each day. We found the three-month timeline to be effective, but you could even start with something as short as one month. If all goes well, you can implement a monthly wellness challenge afterward.

2. Pick a Leader

It’s important to put one or two people in charge of this project right from the start. There needs to be a go-to person available when members of your team have questions about the challenge. Knowing who is running the event and where they can turn for help will make it more appealing to participate from start to finish.

Pick someone in your organization who is a natural fit to lead the way, or ask for volunteers. As the wellness challenge will likely run across diverse teams, consider appointing people from different departments to encourage seamless communication and collaboration.

3. Centralize Your Task Management

Setting up a hub for employees to join and participate is key. Use a task management platform to track all of the to-dos necessary to manage the wellness challenge. This can allow the leaders to brainstorm, plan, manage, and delegate tasks. ‌With a transparent, centralized approach, you can smooth the way for our employees to fully immerse themselves in the challenge.

Our task list consisted of the following:

What’s more, having a list of tasks to tick off fortifies your timeline and makes your goals easier to identify.

4. Decide on Challenge Activities

This is really where you will make or break the success of your wellness challenge. Having diversity within your challenge makes it more appealing to your team as a whole. Also, it better represents what you are trying to accomplish—helping everyone feel good, be productive, and grow.

Fitness-related activities are a good foundation for a wellness challenge, but they shouldn’t be the whole story. Add in things like reading, tech-free time, sleep goals, and other activities that will encourage everyone to be more mindful of their time.

If your wellness challenge ideas are too narrow, you’ll be unintentionally discouraging some people from participating. For instance, if you only reward healthy eating and exercising, people who already do those things will jump right in and take the top spots, leaving others feeling behind and discouraged from the start.

5. Provide a Shared Tracking Environment

The social aspect of a wellness challenge is a big part of what makes it work. How many people try to launch new wellness habits on their own, only to quit shortly thereafter? It’s much harder to stick with something like this when you are doing it on your own.

To make sure this feels like a common effort rather than a solo venture, use a shared digital location where results can be tracked. Even something as simple as a shared spreadsheet where activities can be recorded will do the job. Create a shared wellness challenge template for everyone to use to track their progress. Weekly check-ins can also go a long way toward keeping all participants focused on the journey.

How to Increase Participation for Your Wellness Challenge

Don’t make your wellness challenge mandatory. After all, if someone doesn’t want to do it, they won’t be motivated to engage in activities and make progress. That just defeats the whole purpose of such a program. However, you’ll want to make it as appealing as possible to all your employees.

So, what can you do to encourage widespread participation? Start with these three ideas.

Make a Bold Announcement

If you simply drop a line to your staff through a standard company email, you may not get much of a response. Your teams are busy and probably get dozens of messages a day. A regular, old email will just be something else to drag over to their trash bin.

Take some time to design a compelling announcement, and promote it on all of the communication channels you use in your business. This should be news that no one can miss, and it should encourage everyone to join.

Simplify Communication

Speaking of communication, those who do join the wellness challenge should find it as easy as possible to keep up and enter their stats. Pick one communication channel from the start, and keep everything related to the challenge in that one place. This could be a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel, but you can set it up in whatever way makes sense for your business.

While digital tracking is most effective for hybrid and remote teams, you don’t need to rule out in-person participation. In the office, you could set up a tracking station in the break room or some other common space. However you decide to set it up, the key is simplicity—making it complicated or frustrating will only cause people to drop out.

Keep It Open

You shouldn’t exclude employees from joining a week or two into the wellness challenge. By sharing periodic updates on the status of the challenge with your whole team—not just those involved—you might catch the interest of someone who didn’t think to join when it started, but wants to jump in once they see how well it’s going.

Get Some Friendly Competition Going

Depending on your company’s culture, instilling a little friendly competition can encourage participation as well. Having weekly leaderboard updates and reminding everyone that there will be a wrap-up party with prizes can help employees stick to it. Don’t forget to total up the points at the end of each week and post a screenshot of the leaderboard to keep everyone engaged.

This isn’t meant to be a cutthroat competition, of course—the idea is to support each other and become better as a group. The weekly scoreboard is designed for lighthearted competition along with accountability.

Host a Wrap-Up Party

A wrap-up party recognizes everyone’s participation in your wellness challenge. It’s also a way to thank employees and celebrate them for their efforts. Giving everyone a small gift, as we did with t-shirts, is also a nice gesture of thanks and recognition.

When our event ended, we were still working remotely, so we held a digital event to celebrate each other’s achievements and talk about what we learned. We sent everyone their branded wellness challenge t-shirt the week of the wrap-up party so they could wear them on camera.

You may hold your wrap-up party in the same way, or invite employees along for some in-office fun. As this is the end of the wellness challenge, it’s also the best time to announce the winners and their prizes. Prizes can be cash or wellness or exercise accessories, such as:

Get Started with Your Company Wellness Challenge

We love how our wellness challenge benefitted those on our team who took part. You too can create activities that engage employees to become healthier, happier, and more engaged at work. Not only are wellness challenges proving successful, but they also foster a positive culture of support and camaraderie in the workplace.

Whether you organize your wellness challenge using our framework or go in your own direction, just remember why you’re doing it—to encourage healthy habits for employees. There’s never a bad time to feel better! Find out how your staff really feels with BambooHR.

employee-wellbeing-1
https://www.bamboohr.com/blog/introducing-bamboohr-employee-wellbeing
https://www.bamboohr.com/blog/how-to-make-well-being-a-part-of-your-kpis
https://www.bamboohr.com/blog/major-benefits-employee-engagement
https://www.bamboohr.com/blog/what-is-company-culture