Four questions to set your challenge up for success

While team challenges can accelerate employee engagement and instill both fun, energy and collaboration into the workplace environment, ensuring their effectiveness demands a careful assessment of current workplace dynamics, employee culture, and wellness needs. We encourage our customers to answer four key questions before deciding on an approach:

What type of Challenge should you run, and how often? We've found what works best are four challenges a year with a mix of both physical activity-based challenges, i.e. walking challenges, mixed with other types of activities, such as nutrition, sleep, water (i.e., replacing sugary drinks with water), and stress management. Mixing individual challenges and team challenges offer employees variety and help address a range of wellness needs.
What groups will you offer the team challenge to? More specifically,do you want to challenge one location or the entire organization? Understanding your employee population and what motivates them to action will provide insight into what type of activities to plan for specific groups.
How will you communicate with employees? Using multiple touchpoints to communicate — including email, office collateral, push notifications and other internal communications platforms — will help raise the program's visibility and ensure employees are receiving the motivation and progress updates they need to stay on track. Mobile integration will connect with employees on the platform they use most often, and make it easier to maintain interest and engagement.
How will you reward employees? Consider rewards with enough value to encourage your employees to stay in the game. Also, issuing rewards frequently keeps enthusiasm and participation levels high. The Invitational has a mix of four types of individual and team rewards. Some are easier to attain, others are more challenging. Three of the four are rewarded weekly, rather than having employees wait until the challenge is complete.

By answering these four key questions, organizations will have important information that will help them plan and launch a challenge that is tailored to employee needs. If the results show improvement in employee engagement and an increase in healthy behaviors, you know you've implemented a successful challenge.

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