Starting Up An Employee Wellness Challenge
Healthy employees are happier and more productive; this leads to decreased chronic illness, accidents, sick time and benefits costs. Implementing a wellness challenge at your organization is a great way to get your employees involved in a wellness program. It is also a great opportunity to enhance teamwork and engage in healthy competition.
- Make sure that you set goals and objectives. Decide what area you are going to focus on, weight management, stress reduction, or quitting smoking.
- Determine the best method to use for challenging your employees, whether it is an individual challenge or a team challenge. Try using a point system. Provide a list of wellness-related activities, with each one worth one or more points depending on the activity. Have participants keep track of their points as they earn them, or if working as a team, have a team leader keep track of all team points earned.
- Decide on rewards and incentives you will offer employees who compete in the challenge. Keep in mind your budget. A few ideas for rewards or incentives you can offer are: pedometers, t-shirts, lunch bags, cookbooks, vacation time, reserved parking space, extended lunch break, gift certificates etc.
- Set a time frame. How long do you want the challenge to run for? Set a start date and end date. Allow enough time before the start of the challenge to allow employees to sign up and form teams if you are going to do a team challenge.
- Have a kick-off party for the challenge. On this day you can provide onsite wellness screenings, workshops and hand out educational materials. Have a walkathon to motivate participation.
- Make sure you get the word out about the challenge and build up excitement before the start date. Use email, your company’s intranet, posters and bulletin boards.
- When the challenge ends have a healthy luncheon party to announce the winners and highlight everyone’s accomplishments during the challenge. Hand out a survey to all employees who participated in the challenge to get feedback on how you could improve the challenge next time around.
Category: Employee Wellness
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