Challenges are a great way to promote wellness, build camaraderie, and boost morale. Quarterly or monthly challenges are a fun way to keep employees engaged. Our blog post goes into the details of the benefits of workplace challenges.

When designing a challenge, consider your location, the season and events that may be happening. We encourage you to get creative! Switch between Individual and Group Challenges from time to time to keep things interesting and boost participation. Some organizations will incorporate challenge incentives. Incentives ideas include: raffle entries for sports tickets, the best parking spot, lunch, and fun prizes. Gift cards or a fun group offsite are also great incentive ideas that get people excited. If you're looking for some inspiration for your next company challenge, here are some ideas to help get you started!

These are challenges where each employee works on their own to reach the set goal. They are great for building habits and healthy wellness behaviors.

This is a take on the common "Daily Step" challenge, but here you could change the theme to be an activity, outdoor or wellness-based. Depending on the theme employees can choose their workout/wellness option as they're trying to get 30 minutes of it each day. *This can also be team-based, where teams try to get the highest number of active days to win.

A simple way to hold an individual challenge, this will track the days or minutes of individual employees over a couple of weeks and see who gets in the most. There are fun, creative takes on this, such as "Beat the Boss", where the person to beat is the CEO or team leader! For some extra motivation, you can incorporate small prizes or drawing entries for the daily leaders and winners.

Team challenges are a great way to encourage healthy competition and focus on team-building. Doing challenges in teams also helps people stay accountable to their health and fitness goals. Here at Sworkit, we offer ways to track and show your team's engagement with various stats, further increasing participation.

You can get competitive however you decide to divide up into teams, whether it's between departments or leadership versus the rest of the organization, let the rivalry begin! Teams can be striving to see who gets the most active days in a "Move More" Challenge or set a goal and see which team meets it first like a "Million Minute" Challenge.

If your company is into giving back to the community, you can set a goal for your organization to reach a certain milestone and celebrate that achievement by making a donation that aligns with your organization's values. You can also do this on an individual basis - let winners pick where they want to donate!

Want to get really creative and personalize a challenge that really speaks to your organization and its wellness goals? We're happy to brainstorm and help you plan a custom challenge! Here are some examples that have worked for us:

A great way to introduce Sworkit Challenges at your company or school is to set up a 5-day challenge where you encourage everyone to work out for at least 3 different days, or a total of 45 minutes for the week.

Run a challenge that gives people permission to check in with themselves once a day and step away from work to intentionally lower their stress levels. Ideas include Stress Breaks, Movement Breaks, or Breath Breaks. Participants get points for logging their self-care time such as meditation, stretching, or play.

Fresh air, sunshine, and a revitalizing approach to fitness are all benefits and motivators here. Challenge your employees to get outside and active for a suggested number of days. Spring and Fall are the obvious times of year to kick this off, but a long, holiday weekend or the beginning of summer break would also be perfect. It's fun to see the variety of activities participants enjoy and you'll definitely learn something new about each other!

Here's what the Sworkit team has been up to! We love coming together for a fun challenge:

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Instead of giving gift cards or wellness gear, give people their time back with time off, a work from home day, or even an overnight trip to a destination of choice (from pre-selected spots).

Challenges can go beyond logging gym activity or tracking steps.
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If your company has a lot of outdoor aficionados, try bringing the outdoor elements into the challenge!
If you've got a lot of parents at your company, allow activity with kids to count for something.
Even if it's a challenge that focuses on reducing stress and increasing productivity at work, we can make that happen.
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Whatever the case, our challenge feature will help meet the activity preferences of everyone!

Regroup ran an activity challenge to award the participant with the most activity overall. They added a bonus that gave participants another chance to win a prize by completing the "Sworkit Favorites" workout collection during the challenge.

Human Resource Training, Inc. created an internal challenge using our "Couch to Fit 6-week Program." Instead of having employees log external activity or select workouts from the Sworkit library, the goal of this challenge was to complete as many workouts from one of our specific programs!
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As you can see, the challenge possibilities are endless!
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Highlight employees for their efforts and participation. Make sure to celebrate them in ways everyone notices - on posters, virtual announcements, email blasts, etc.!

This shows people they're valued, their efforts matter, and it encourages them to keep going!
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