Setting Up a Successful Company Fitness Challenge

Since the beginning of this millennium, there has been only a trend toward the global decline of physical activity – meaning more than 36.8% of the world's population does not move enough. The problem is even twice as worse in high-income countries. Of course, there have always been amazing individuals, but to have a true corporate culture swims against the tide requires a very conscious and consistent action plan from HR.

One opportunity is activity challenge. There are a variety of motivations to participate in activity challenges. Often, first inspiration comes in the form of a favorable testimonial about someone else's successful experience. 

Although there are many reasons why you can end up opting to take up the task on your own, one of the most compelling is the desire to boost the health of the employee or a feeling of team togetherness. As a result, it is critical that you have a clear understanding of your motivation. This is the only method to assess and achieve success.

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Features That Help To Create a Virtual Activity Challenges

Step challenge isn't just comparing how many steps someone is doing - it's to increase health and wellbeing. It's about creating that culture at work, while we spend most of our days there. 

We have heard a lot that human resources managers have tried to do step challenges in an excel sheet. Still, there are some simple reasons why they chose to join YuMuuv.

In Excel, everyone has to insert their daily steps manually, while in YuMuuv it's an automatic process and can't come up with topics like cheating. Also, people want to see the ranking - it motivates them to do that extra daily walk or morning run. We have even examples when teams decided to do the active meetings, so during the meeting, they are walking around or even just standing.

Also people like variety - just counting steps for a year isn't attractive, creating challenges. Challenges create that bond between people, but also the excitement to push yourself.

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How To Start Your Office Step Challenge?

1. Plan

• When will the challenge start? It is important not to pick a period full of holidays or extremely busy periods. On the other hand, do you have any upcoming team events? If yes, this is an amazing time to introduce a new workplace step challenge to your employees. 
• Which teams would you like to make? Are teams as departments or by countries? Let the employees make teams before signing up so they can choose a team right after making the account.
• Where will the communication take place? It is important that the communication is running in one channel. So people know where to search for information if needed. Also, in YuMuuv we have a chat under every challenge so there can be informal conversations (sending pictures, etc.).
• Will you give out prizes? What's the budget for that category? Who will get those? 
  Tip: Don't only consider giving a prize for the best participant/team. To get better engagement, communicate the prize will be drawn between all participants, who accomplished the goal. 
  So even those, who are behind, have motivation to keep going.  Then your employees feel that they don’t have to be best out of best, but they can be best of themselves.
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2. Make These Steps

• About a week before the activity challenge is starting, communicate it to everyone. Make sure you get the management on board! They are role models for other employees.
• To involve as many staff as possible in the challenge, it is important to give as much information as possible in as short a form as possible. This should be done in an "easy to understand" language, with illustrations and step-by-step points where appropriate. This will give participants a sense of simplicity, which in turn will encourage more employees to participate. Who would want to spend their spare time on something complicated and incomprehensible.
  In YuMuuv, we've taken care of that and everything you need is already there - email templates, instructions for registration, integration information, troubleshooting, etc. All you have to do is send them on.
• During the office step challenge, keep the communication alive. Keep participants active sharing stories and good practices. That's why a good communication platform is important!
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3. Reward

• It's time to make conclusions. Who did the most steps? Who was the most active team? Who won the prize? 
• When will your next office fitness challenge take place?
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Encouraging Employees

In YuMuuv, we have created a lot of different challenge types, just to keep your employees having active fun for longer. Starting with a regular walking challenge or our unique activity index challenge, where you can see different fitness levels. 

Also, you can make all the challenges either in individual, collective or consistent perspective. We have written a whole blog post about these so you can check out our annual employee wellness program example.

That means everyone will find fun beginning motivation to turn it into a consistent habit in months. So if you're interested in changing the activity culture in your company while increasing workplace health, let us know!

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Excitement Requires Variety

We've all experienced moments over the years when an event that at first seemed to be a source of excitement and gaiety takes on the dimensions of a tedious obligation. To prevent this from happening, a variety of challenges is a must. This will help your employees to keep and develop the habit of moving, though, rather than creating unintended negative emotions.

To make sure there is no shortage of spice, at YuMuuv we have developed a wide range of challenges - step challenges, collective challenges, persistence challenges, and so on. Best of all, you can always think up your own challenge and get it to your employees quickly and easily. Whether it is 20 squats a day, 8h of sleep, 5 glasses of water or 10lk of reading a book. 

As you can see from the previous sentence, Yumuuv is not only an app that promotes physical activity, but can also focus on mental health and social health, in addition to physical health. To make sure there is no shortage of challenge ideas, we have also listed 52 challenge ideas, all of which can be done through YuMuuv!
 

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Why YuMuuv?

We have made that part of the challenge very easy – a lot of tools with different varieties of corporate fitness challenges, automatic activities to save your time and a bunch of blog posts with tips and tricks. For example, the one, where we wrote about how to create a step challenge at work.

Also admin manuals for you to navigate easily in the app and user manuals to get your employees fast on board. In addition, communication templates with important information for you to send out and the full annual plan you can insert all at once, just in 10 minutes.

We have a customer support and help center so you don't have to deal with employee's problems or technical questions. We have an automatic ranking sheet about your employees, but also with all the companies that are moving with YuMuuv. And a lot more just to help you enjoy that journey with others as well with minimal managing effort!

So if you feel now that your employees would be a fun support team to move with, let us know and we will make it reality!