15 Wellness Challenge Ideas
In its simplest form, a workplace wellness challenge is a set of goals for your associates meant to teach or improve an aspect of healthy living or mindset with a touch of competition and possibly a prize attached to the outcome. .
Make wellness fun with an eat the rainbow challenge.
Challenges can be completed in person, via our app, as a team, or as an individual. They can cover a wide variety of topics, and they can be short or long.
Encouraging and engaging the participation of most employees (ideally from each level of the company) is an important part of conducting a successful challenge. Setting up and running your challenge involves many steps. Make the most of your challenge by following our get started right guide.
What are the Benefits of a Wellness Challenge? There are many benefits to hosting wellness challenges for your team. With the right programming and consistent involvement, staff members and the company will experience at least one of these benefits:
Lower employee turnover rates
Reduced absenteeism
Increased productivity and a brighter outlook in general
Lower healthcare costs for the company (and each employee)
Improved morale
Will make your company more attractive to applicants
With few exceptions, the team's Movement 1st Wellness has worked to see an uptick in “feel-good” vibes when they make strides to care for their health and well-being. It’s not something that is planned; it just happens naturally!
Ways to Avoid Common Mistakes As with any new program, it may take a bit of explaining for it to catch on. Using this quick list as a reference will help you avoid oversights in planning and, therefore, elicit the most participation from your team.
1. Use simple, easy-to-track metrics for overall assessment during and after the program. Experts agree that what you track improves. When you can show your teams and your leadership the benefits as data, it will help to gain more support and involvement. (Movement 1st Wellness’ app has a fantastic dashboard designed just for this!) Without the data, you won’t know which aspects of the program are working and which are not.
2. Incentivize employees for participating, but don’t penalize those who are not. If feeling better in general is not enough of an incentive, offering a prize of sorts is often a fantastic motivator for even the most reluctant of participants. Your “prizes” should focus on making the challenge attractive to employees rather than imposing penalties for lack of involvement.
3. Create a challenge that is at the right level for your team. Keep Goldilocks in mind here. If a challenge is too intense, your dropout rate will be too high for leadership to endorse repeating it. If your challenge is too “easy,” your team will not feel the benefits or be bored and not want to do it again. Conducting a survey ahead of time can be very helpful here.
4. Keep individual outcomes private. Allowing participants to share the details and successes they want to, but keeping the ones they want to themselves, is of utmost importance. Creating goals and prizes that bring joy, but not embarrassment, is the goal.
mindfulness challenges = healthier teams
Here are some ideas you can use to start brainstorming for your team. Remember, not every challenge is right for every team and organization. The intention of these lists is to provide inspiration you can build on and customize TO HELP improve the lives at your office.
Mindset
Create and share vision boards – a la art show style – you can provide magazines, glue, and scissors etc. or do it through an app and print on nice canvases to display.
Host moments of calm, where all work stops for 3-5 minutes for breathwork or to meditate silently
Post a positive mantra and ask employees to repeat it 10x first thing in the AM. It could change weekly or monthly
Provide a mindset book to each staff member, have weekly discussion groups
Run a secret encourager – similar to a Secret Santa – where anonymous notes are delivered with words of encouragement or thankfulness for a job well done
Active Life
Most steps in a week (measured by week allows for schedule variance) – you can set this with a max, it can be individual or team-based
Participation in “active snacks” on lunch breaks, ie., 10 jumping jacks at the start and finish of it.
Sleep Challenge (yes, technically a sleep challenge is an active life challenge!) – Ask employees to track the number of hours they sleep, take it a step further and ask for data from a sleep tracking app or device. OR you can ask them to improve their pre-bedtime routines.
Encourage teams to meet at walking meetings or to host “active” team building outings, think bowling or mini-golf instead of a traditional happy hour.
BINGO – create bingo cards with several different activities that you know your staff enjoys or would benefit from, this can keep things “fresh” and provide options for employees to pick an choose how they want to be more active over time.
Nutrition
Water challenge – most days drinking up to a gallon a day in a row
Treats turn-in day – have your team bring in the treats they want to ditch from their pantries and have them turn them into care packages for a local charity or for troops overseas
Veggie Day – who can get the most colors of veggies in their meals in a day?
Host a Recipe or Cookbook Swap
Try a new protein – we all get stuck in ruts, and asking people to try something new may have them finding options they love that will support them in the long run.
There are many facets of wellness. If these don’t fit your team quite right, other areas you can focus on are financial, environmental, and social involvement.
Feeling ready to plan your first wellness challenge?
Yes! You are! As a successful HR professional, you have the skills and forethought to create an impactful company plan. But, just in case, go ahead and do a super quick mini-challenge right now: forget what you might be fearing about wellness challenges being complicated or lame. Any challenge—in life or in the office—can be fun and possibly even life-changing!
When you decide to implement your helpful ideas, your enthusiasm for the wellness challenge is the best way to promote the benefits and encourage participation. Use the thought of maximizing your team’s potential and lowering your costs related to injury, sick and stress leaves, and employee turnover as YOUR motivation. Soon after you start, you’ll see the work needed to set up one or a series of challenges quickly becomes worth it when the benefits build on themselves.
Now that you know the basics and have ideas, you can read about setting up your first challenge with our guide. Through proven programming, Movement 1st Wellness can help you create and implement the right workplace wellness challenge—and possibly a full program—for you and your team that has the potential to amplify satisfaction, enjoyment, and productivity.
