A sense of team or community can make your workplace more fun and effective. A great way to build this is through a company wellness challenge. Here are three ways a wellness challenge can help your team beyond just the physical health benefits.

Accountability

In a fitness challenge, you want your employees to interact with each other and hold each other accountable for their team and individual fitness goals. Similarly, you want employees to hold each other accountable to do their best work on projects and their day to day tasks. It is important for employees to hold each other accountable so that every issue or question doesn’t have to go higher up. Check your team leaderboards and remind your teammates to get their steps in each day if you’re doing a step challenge, so this level of accountability becomes the norm on your team.

Team Building

Use your wellness challenge as an excuse to practice some team-building skills. There are quite a few skills that you can focus on during a challenge that are also important in your day-to-day work, such as:

• Aligning with goals
• Working well together
• Brainstorming
• Encouragement/ positive reinforcement
• Time management
• Persuasion skills
• Communication skills

Choose one or two from the above list as a team leader and focus on fostering that skill throughout the challenge.

Fun

Lastly, it is always just more fun to be on a team that gets along and jokes with each other. We all want team members who go the extra mile to make the workplace more enjoyable for everyone. To do this, you need to become that team member. So go all out for your wellness challenge – encourage your teammates, give shoutouts to top weekly winners in your meetings, schedule walking meetings. Incorporate this spirit into your wellbeing challenge to make for a more fun workplace and others will follow in your suit.

Start building a sense of community with your corporate wellness program and watch it spill over to your work environment.

Having a wellness challenge for your employees is one of the smartest things you can do as an employer. Having happy, healthy employees means they are better equipped to handle their jobs. Here are three big benefits your employees will gain from your wellness initiative.

Having a company fitness challenge is a great way to reduce your employees’ stress levels. Aerobic activity “reduces levels of the body’s stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol. It also stimulates the production of endorphins, chemicals in the brain that are the body’s natural painkillers and mood elevators” according to Harvard Medical School. Because of this, physical activity is known to be a healthy way to deal with and reduce stress. By rewarding employees who stay physically active, you are also encouraging them to de-stress. Additionally, giving your employees something else to think about or catch up on besides the current big project or the next looming deadline, gives them the mental break they need throughout the day to stay mentally sharp.

When you reward employees for doing a good job, it incentivizes them to keep trying and producing good results. Bonuses and company recognition for a job well done are not always possible for all your employees. But giving rewards or shout outs to the team member who logged the most steps over the weekend or the department beating the rest in the company fitness challenge is a great way to encourage employees in a different way. This makes them feel good about themselves and if they are feeling good, they will probably be doing better at work as well. Additionally, a company wellness challenge is a simple way to show your employees that you do care about their health.

A little healthy competition is a great way to increase engagement and conversation between coworkers. It’s a lot more fun to strike up a conversation with a co-worker about who is at the top of the competition leaderboard than to make small talk about the weather again. This increase in social connection can help create a sense of community and good company culture. The bottom line is a workplace challenge is just plain fun and everyone can appreciate some of that in their workday. 

These are three big benefits to having a company wellness challenge, although there are many more. It’s easy to see why a fitness challenge not only helps individual employees but also helps your overall company atmosphere as well. 

Need help creating your company challenge? We are here to help. Learn more about our corporate program or let us know you’re interested and we will get in touch!