If you are hoping to increase participation in your corporate wellness program, you need to understand how your team members are motivated. Since everyone is motivated in different ways, it’s important to incorporate different types of motivation into your company fitness challenge. We will go over some of the main types of motivation and how to apply them to your company’s fitness challenge.

Incentive motivation is when you are motivated to perform a task because of the potential reward or payoff. Incorporate this by having rewards for your challenges that your employees will actually want. Company branded swag is a common reward employers use, but it’s not the most effective motivator. A Fitbit, Kindle or gift cards to a nice restaurant might be more motivating to your team than a sweatshirt with their workplace logo.

With achievement motivation, you care more about committing to a goal and accomplishing an objective than attaining awards. For people who are more achievement motivated it could be helpful to have challenges with personal goals. An example would be individuals compete for who can reach 300K steps the fastest in a month. This would be better for people who are motivated by achievements than a collective goal for the whole company to reach 10 million steps. With an individual goal, employees can try to achieve it without relying on others.

With power or influence motivation you strive to control your life and others’ lives. To tap into this type of motivation, you can add rewards for your company fitness challenge that give the winner the ability to make decisions or more freedom. This could include a pass to wear more casual clothes for a day or deciding which charity the company will donate to this year.

Fear motivation is when you’re motivated to avoid negative consequences. Fear motivation can sound bad, but it can actually be quite useful and healthy. Set up an accountability buddy program that employees can opt into. This helps some people who are fear motivated try to avoid the consequence of disappointing their accountability partner, by getting their daily steps in for the company challenge.

A person who is driven by affiliation or social motivation is motivated by the spirit of cooperation and by a feeling of belonging. With these types of individuals, it might be good to have collective fitness challenges such as having the whole team strive for 1 million steps in a month. You also could organize group walking breaks so that employees can socialize while collectively working towards the team goal.

By incorporating different types of rewards and challenges into your company wellness program, you will be able to motivate more employees to take part and enjoy your fitness challenges.