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That is why social fitness goals are so powerful in workplace wellness programs. When coworkers support each other and rely on each other to reach goals, it's much easier to get the entire team involved and excited about fitness.
Today we're here to talk about a few inspiring ideas to help your entire team, company, and corporation get involved and motivated toward shared fitness goals.
Individual fitness challenges can be fun, but only after everyone is engaged. The best way to get started with workplace fitness is not an employee vs employee competition, but a team-based challenge instead. Create large-number goals for everyone to reach together with concerted efforts, like walking 700,000 steps in a month. That's 5,000 steps per person per day for a 5 member team. The active members of the team will both make the competition easier for your less active team members and encourage them to get up and take a few extra steps per day. The teamwork aspect is far more inspiring than just telling each person to reach a goal.
When the goal is reached, reward the team altogether. Then recognize individual achievements as a lesser focus. Congratulate the big-steppers, but also congratulate those who got active and improved their fitness even if they weren't the main contributors.
Once you've got your team in the right mindset of working together to reach fitness goals, consider ways to set team against team to use that spark of competition as inspiration. If you have one location, set departments and individual teams against each other, like sales vs finance or logistics vs inventory. Whatever departments or divisions you have, challenge them to work as teams to win a shared competition and the winning team gets something cool.
If you have multiple office locations, it can be very fun to compete on the location-to-location basis. Challenge your Chicago and LA offices to beat each other, or your London and NYC offices to take the most steps and get the best sleep for combined competing points.
Another great approach is to give a teamwork exercise some context. One of our best programs is a scenario-based on climbing a mountain. You can do this with multiple competing teams or one team focusing on meeting their goals. Each stage of the adventure has a unique team-shared goal. For example, you start with the foothills, challenging each team to walk 5 miles per day, combined, for two weeks of training. Then it's a race to base-camp. Whichever team takes the most steps in three weeks wins the race.
Mix it up. For the next two weeks, it's a rest-up at camp, and everyone must try to sleep for at least 7 hours a night. Then the climb begins, and the step goal increases to 140k steps over 2 weeks. Mix it up again with multiple theoretical mountain paths. Each team takes a path and whoever takes the most steps in 2 weeks wins. In the final sprint, everyone works together to take an incredibly high number of steps; supporting each other all the way as you must at the top of a mountain.
A more science-oriented style of inspirational wellness goal is preparing for a space journey. Start with astronaut training, challenging everyone to meet the 10,000 steps per day goal in two weeks. Then an activity challenge for 3 weeks as the competing ships race to a distant alien planet, or mix it up with a 'cryo travel' stage of sleep health instead. On the planet, another steps race to explore with some fun fact-based goals. For example, it takes 15 million steps to walk the circumference of the moon. Then meet aliens and run from them. Only the fastest team will 'survive' unscathed. Finish with a final team challenge on the journey home and celebrate with a ticker-tape parade.
Finally, there's the marathon angle. Many people love the idea of getting involved in walks or races, especially for charity. Commit your team to either join a charity walk or sponsor one of your own and spend the next few months training as a team to walk for a good cause. Be supportive and help your less-active team members feel just as involved as your already fit employees. Everyone loves a good cause and a big event day you can celebrate together.
Photo Credit: Depositphotos
