How to Run a Fun (& Successful) Employee Wellness Challenge

Blog

Running an employee wellness challenge sounds great on paper—until you’re faced with getting buy-in from leadership and engaging a diverse workforce. And traditional challenges, like step counts or dietary goals, are limited to physical fitness benefits. They can exclude employees due to mobility limitations, cultural practices, or personal preferences.

What’s the solution?

A mental health challenge is more inclusive and effective for promoting connection and wellbeing across your workforce. We’ll show you how to design a fun wellness challenge that drives engagement, delivers real results, and avoids common pitfalls.

Why run a wellness challenge?

Let’s start with the benefits—both for your employees and your organization. Communicating the value to executives helps you get buy-in to move your initiative forward.

Mental health-focused challenges can create meaningful change in a few areas.

Supporting employee wellbeing

Wellness challenges are more than just feel-good initiatives—these challenges are designed to boost worker wellbeing. Programs that promote mental health can improve mood and reduce stress and exhaustion.

Decreased absenteeism and turnover

Imagine happier, healthier people and how they show up differently at work. Mental health promotion can lead to improved staff retention and reduced medical leave and sick days due to mental health concerns.

Increased employee engagement and productivity

Gallup research finds that the most engaged teams are associated with 23% greater profitability than the least engaged teams. Wellness challenges are a great way to engage employees through connection with teammates, company culture, and the values of the business.

How to run an employee wellness challenge

Now that we’ve covered the why, here’s how to plan and execute a successful wellness challenge. Depending on your organization’s size and available resources, you can work through these steps individually or with a small project group.

Before the challenge

1. Assess employee needs & preferences

Start by understanding your workforce’s unique needs around mental wellbeing. This might include quantitative insights from health claim data or culture surveys and qualitative insights from focus groups or employee feedback.

2. Set goals for your wellness challenge

What specific outcomes would you like to achieve? Decide on two or three goals that will support employee needs and organizational priorities. Use these goals to set measures of success (the specific metrics you’ll track) and design a tailored wellness challenge that will drive more participation.

3. Decide on the type of challenge

There are countless challenge ideas to choose from, but we recommend selecting one that’s inclusive and engaging for all employees. For example:

Kindness challenge: Encourage small acts of kindness to boost mood, reduce stress, and strengthen social bonds.
Gratitude challenge: Help employees reflect on what they’re grateful for, which has been shown to enhance happiness and mental health.
Mindfulness or meditation challenge: Offer guided sessions to promote focus and relaxation.
Stress less challenge: Introduce different stress management practices like breathing exercises, time management tips, or yoga.

4. Plan the logistics

Next, you’ll need to decide on your challenge logistics, including the duration, dates, and a platform or tool to run the challenge on.

With headversity SOLO, running a health challenge is simple and effective. The platform offers personalized mental fitness practices tailored to each employee’s needs. SOLO’s streak challenge feature drives participation through automated reminders and gamified progress tracking.

5. Include competition and incentives

Use game design elements like leaderboards and participation rewards to foster friendly competition. Encourage employees to share their experiences or achievements with the team to keep things fun, celebrate together, and stay motivated.

6. Identify wellness champions (including leadership)

Select a few employees from different groups who are interested in promoting the challenge across your teams. Get leaders to join and advocate for the challenge—it’s key to success and can improve how employees perceive your culture.

Did you know? 73% of employees with senior managers who actively support wellbeing initiatives feel their organization helps them develop a healthy lifestyle, compared to just 11% without such leadership support.

7. Develop a communication campaign

To inform your workforce and build excitement about participating, create a communication plan for before, during, and after the challenge. Consider including:

The specific benefits of participating for employees
Stories from employees about how wellness initiatives have improved their lives
The tools and resources they’ll need, and how to access them
And of course, the incentives or rewards for joining the challenge

After the challenge

8. Create a feedback loop

How did it go? At the end of the challenge, gather feedback from participants to evaluate the impact and identify areas for improvement. Keep feedback anonymous to receive more candid responses.

9. Do a challenge retrospective

With your company stakeholders, assess the employee feedback and metrics you tracked. This helps key decision makers understand the tangible outcomes and insights to refine future wellness programs.

10. Integrate wellbeing into your culture

Don’t let your progress fade! Use the challenge as a springboard for a lasting wellness culture. Implement initiatives like resilience training, flexible work arrangements, mental health days, or on-site wellness events to sustain momentum beyond the challenge.

Pitfalls to avoid in your wellness challenge

A word to the wise—here’s what to avoid for a successful employee wellness challenge.

Triggering health concerns

Steer away from ideas that might do more harm than good, like weight loss challenges, which may trigger people with disordered eating or body dysmorphia. Overly competitive or complex challenges can potentially cause stress and discourage some from participating.

Trying to make everyone happy

Some employees might not be interested in wellness challenges, no matter how they’re designed, and that’s alright. Don’t expect everybody to be on board or participate.

Making it feel cheesy

One of the biggest fears when launching a wellness challenge? Having your employees find it corny, cheesy, or “cringe.” Some principles to keep in mind here are:

Avoid gimmicky or juvenile themes
Keep it lighthearted and fun without exaggerating or overselling it
Make participation voluntary

Being too intrusive

Communicate that it’s optional to participate. Don’t request anyone discuss personal health information, such as medical conditions or treatments.

Alienating team members

Design your challenge to be inclusive by offering a variety of activities and including remote-friendly options. Mental health challenges tend to be more accessible than physical fitness challenges for remote or hybrid teams and people with different physical abilities.

Run a successful challenge with headversity

Implementing an employee wellness challenge doesn’t have to be complicated. Focus on inclusivity, engagement, and outcomes that are meaningful to your organization.

Let headversity SOLO do the heavy lifting for you. The SOLO platform offers mental fitness training tailored to individual goals. Our done-for-you promotional materials and gamification features drive employee engagement. Plus, with robust reporting tools, you’ll gain insights that go beyond participation metrics to measure real impact.

Learn more about SOLO.