Free Employee Wellness Challenge Templates
What Is a Team Wellness Challenge?
A wellness challenge is a fun and at the same time useful endeavor, whose aim is to create good habits in people, improve mental and physical health and create a sense of belonging in employees. Challenges don't have to be difficult. Let's take a simple step challenge for example. All you have to do is just walk and be as active as possible. The result is better health and well-being, higher productivity, good mood, etc.
We all want to be healthy and the best version of ourselves. One of the greatest joys of employers is when their employees are healthy, active, and cheerful. The goal of every effective workplace wellness program is to promote the health of employees, support healthy behavior, increase employee engagement and develop good habits. This is typically accomplished through a variety of workplace wellness challenges or campaigns.
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Why Do a Team Wellness Challenge?
Wellness challenges bring along many positives for both the company and the employees. Let's look at some of the positive effects that organizing challenges bring.
1. Reduce healthcare costs
The key to reducing healthcare costs and health risks is to cultivate healthy living habits. The best way to do this is through employee wellness programs that focus on changing behavior and forming good habits to improve employee health behavior and reduce health risks and associated healthcare costs.
Study published by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that people who didn’t exercise spent $5,813 per year on healthcare costs, while those who exercised between 0 and 150 minutes per week spent $5,076 per year. Those who exercised more than 150 minutes per week only spent $4,500 annually.
2. Increase productivity
Employee productivity is an assessment of the efficiency of a worker or group of workers. It is a factor that is also affected by physical and mental health. Maybe you have noticed sometimes where someone is physically present at work, but "not there" mentally. It can be caused by stress, mental and physical health problems as well as lack of sleep. Therefore, it is important to organize wellness challenges so that the health and well-being of employees improves and productivity increases with it. Go365 Five-Year Study found that employees who are highly engaged in the wellness and rewards program over several years are more productive. They also have fewer sick days.
According to a study published by The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, improving your lifestyle and focusing on your own health and well-being leads to an additional 10.3 hours of productive time. By organizing wellness challenges, you also save money. In the aforementioned study employees participating in wellness programs made lifestyle changes that saved their companies about $353 in recovered productivity per person annually.
3. Go from one challenge to continuous engagement
If we really want to achieve changes in our health and well-being, remember one word - consistency. Short-term actions do not guarantee success and do not bring the desired results. It is important to be consistent and achieve changes in your habits, knowledge, skills, etc. Just like you can't gain 10 kilos in one day, it's also not possible to lose 10 kilos in a couple of days.
Doing a one-month step challenge for employees is nice, but think about whether it also fulfills your desired goals? Most likely not. Therefore, when planning challenges, it is important to think about how to consistently involve employees so that motivation and will are maintained and all goals are achieved. We in Yumuuv believe that successful companies do consistently what others do occasionally. Be the successful one!
Elements of a Great Team Wellness Challenge
1. How to differentiate and gamify your challenge
Have you started using a wellness program? Do you want to improve the health and well-being of your employees? Are you afraid that the employees won't come along with it? We have a suggestion for you. Think things through and make it playful.
If we want to achieve goals, we need to engage and motivate employees. Enter gamification. The process of using game mechanics like competition, incentives and achievement to make a program more engaging.
You make the employees collect the steps and share with them an excel file where everyone enters their own steps. Most likely, people will soon lose interest and the whole thing will require too much fuss. How would a step challenge sound, where people can monitor each other's progress and motivate themselves on a daily basis, and where a prize awaits all the good ones?
We at YuMuuv can help you and create the coolest and most interesting challenges. A collective calorie challenge, 5 minute planks every day, a YuMuuv activity index challenge or a sleep challenge instead? The choice is large and there is something for everyone's interests. taking care of your health doesn't have to be a chore. With us, you can do it fun, together and easily. Better health and well-being are guaranteed.
2. How to set engaging goals and awards
If employees achieve good results in the challenge, they should be recognized for it. This increases employee satisfaction and makes them happier, which in turn ensures a more cohesive and healthy team for the company.
It is worth remembering that everyone should be noticed and recognized. Not all employees in your company may be super capable and active right away. So it's important to notice small improvements. For example, recognize those who have set personal records, those who have been the most active users of the app, and who have synced every day of a challenge. Or why not give away lottery prizes. It is important that not only the first place holders receive awards and recognition, but others also have the opportunity. We've put together a short list of award ideas for you to get inspired by
Here it is also important to think through the goals. When setting them, you should think in such a way that everyone can afford it. If you set too big and unrealistic goals, people will not have the motivation to make an effort, because for example, a person who otherwise walks 3000 steps a day knows that suddenly starting to walk 10,000 steps is too difficult to begin with. So start calmly and at a comfortable pace with goals that are within everyone's reach. In this way, motivation and the desire to compete are preserved.
3. How to track progress and set up leaderboards
Tracking progress and set up leaderboards is an important part of doing challenges. When making healthy changes, it is important to monitor progress in order to see your own journey and get extra motivation to work harder. Monitoring progress is also important for employers to see how well the program works, how active and good employees are and whether there are things that need improvement.
YuMuuv has made this very easy for you. In YuMuuv every individual gets an overview how active they are on daily basis. This also gives them an opportunity to understand their own progress. The employer can also monitor the progress at any moment, see the leaderboard and export the company's activity data. Every month, we give our customers the opportunity to receive advanced analytics about the activity behavior and progress of users and the company as a whole.
4. Timeline For Your First Team Wellness Challenge
- Preparation week. YuMuuv will help creating and personalizing the system for your company needs, providing user manuals and admin access. All you need to do is communicate with your employees and you are ready for successful onboarding.
- Challenge launch week. Share the excitement via posting a photo or text in YuMuuv chat and notify users that the challenge has started. In case of questions or technical problems, there is no need to worry at all. Our customer support specialist is there for everyone and is happy to help.
- Mid-Challenge week. Engage your people by cheering up both top and medium/low achievers by sending them a thumbs up, encouraging text or just noticing them in the office
- Ending week. Remind people to check if their integration is up to date to get the best leaderboard overview. Once the challenge has ended everybody has 72 hours to update their missing data if they should have any, we recommend making final communication of the winners 3-days after the challenge has ended.
Free Wellness Challenge Templates
We have prepared four wellness challenge templates that are easy to implement and can extend across the year for your organization. You can implement them for free on your own or manage it better and easier with our employee wellness challenge application. But all the full details of the templates, the program itself are available for you to explore and use for free. Read, implement and enjoy!
1. Template: Most Inclusive Wellness Challenge
This free template is perfect for companies that have a diverse workforce that need easy to participate and engaging range of activities year-round. The template itself is year-long and consists of 12 different month-long challenges that cover all different aspects of wellness. It's super-easy to implement and ready for use here.
2. Template: Activity-Focused Wellness Challenge
This is a year-long challenges plan that inspires employees to do one unique activity-related challenge each month. From how many calories you can burn as a collective to increasing the number of squats you can do – every month holds an unique goal connected to a measurable activity. Explore how that may work for you and start with a few simple steps.
3. Template: YuMuuv Wellness Challenge Plan
Do you want to guide your employees to an active lifestyle in the new year? Use the template that our YuMuuv team does and plan for yourselves a fun and engaging year. See what we do in detail and replicate it in a few simple steps.
4. Template: Highest Variety Wellness Challenge Plan
Are you working in an environment where you afraid that people might get bored doing one activity over and over again? This is the plan focuses on keeping up the exciting and fresh vibe. Check it out.
Why YuMuuv Is Better Than The Free Template?
1. Easier UX than any Excel or PDF template
Free template is certainly not pointless, it can be very awesome and be sure to download this one for yourself. However, the advancement of technology has made things easier and more convenient to do. So this is one reason why YuMuuv is a good choice. It doesn't require too much work and effort on your part to make things work and reach all employees. YuMuuv's user experience is great, and organizing active and interesting challenges has never been easier.
2. Less effort inviting, tracking, and awarding people
In YuMuuv we do our best to help you with setting up the account with clear plan to communicate to your employees. Inviting people and joining is simple. Even easier is tracking results and progress, which is all done for you, and you no longer have to calculate and summarize data in an excel file yourself. The easier it is later to recognize good employees who have been active and involved
3. Avoid one-size fits all solutions: choose between multiple challenge types
There are a lot of templates with challenges ideas and plans. They are often based on the most popular challenges. However, people are different and what suits one may not suit another. It is important to base your choices and plans on the interests and needs of your company's employees. Also make sure there is variety so that there is no boredom and there is still excitement every month. Often it is more difficult to create it with a template and there is a lack of resources to implement these interesting ideas. With YuMuuv, not a single idea goes unfulfilled, and there will be variety and excitement for a long time.
4. Create continuous engagement year-round
Like we said before, consistency is important to achieve real changes and form good habits. In YuMuuv we will help you set up a long-term plan so that you can involve your employees for a longer period of time and achieve good results together.
FAQs
1. What is a team wellness challenge?
A wellness challenge is a fun and at the same time useful endeavor, whose aim is to create good habits in people, improve mental and physical health and create a sense of belonging in employees.
2. Do you have sample fitness challenge ideas?
If you're running out of great ideas, don't worry, we got you! You can have a look at annual wellness plan ideas or some fun challenge ideas. Every company can create unique challenges that meet its wishes and needs. If you want to save some time and be smart, just book a demo, and we set you and your company up with just minutes so that you can move with us, gather activity, and be the best version of yourself.
3. What are some great wellness challenge incentives?
Existence of incentives should not be underestimated, because one of the most successful ways to get employees to engage in wellness programs is to offer incentives for participation.The selection of wellness challenge incentives is very wide, and when making choices, it is worth considering the character, interests, etc. of your company and employees. Have a look at this article, where we give you a nice overview of employee wellness incentives.
4. What are some good team name ideas?
The team name can be as unique as you like. When choosing a name, you can take inspiration from everything, whether it is your favorite movie or song, an actor, or even your favorite food. Here is some inspiration and some great names that could be just right for your team.
5. Any more tips for running a successful wellness challenge?
Organizing challenges is actually an easier and more fun process than it might seem if you do it smartly and thoughtfully. Take a look at our blog article where we share with you how to set up a successful challenge.
