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Team Building Apps

Engaging with your workforce while driving your teams to be both healthy and motivated is a tough line to tow.

Online Team Building

More and more human relation departments are looking towards the digital world to help solve their problems. Online games such as Game Night for the apple TV are a great way for small groups to get together and participate in some friendly competition with an easy to use interface.

However when it comes to getting staff active and moving in the real world you need to look at different solutions.

What is a step challenge and how do you run one?

Running A Step Challenge

A step challenge is an online exercise initiative run by a company or organisation that encourages participants to get active in their daily lives. Users connect their smart phones or wearable devices to the challenge app and track their daily step counts against a virtual map around the world; the more the users walk, the more they explore!

Challenges can vary in how they are set up, with some pushing for individuals to participate by themselves and others encouraging teams to combine their effort and keep each other motivated.

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Creating your own step challenge

Below we will go over some of the steps you need to consider before creating your first step challenge.

‍Individuals or team challenges?

Are you looking to create an exercise challenge that is focused on an individual trying to complete the challenge, or are you looking to motivate a group of users to work together? Both options have their merits, however the team option can have added benefits of allowing for friendly competition and team building.
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Big Team Challenge also has two modes of competition, Teams vs Teams and One Big Challenge. You can read more about these challenge modes or get in touch to learn more.

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Choosing a virtual route

It's always fun to choose an exciting idea such as "walk around the world" or "walk to the moon and back", but these goals can often be overwhelming for users.
You should first consider how many users are on each team and what distance each user can comfortably be expected to do each day.

As a simple estimate you can use the following calculation:

Number of users per team x Number of days the challenge lasts x daily step goal = Route length

For example - 5 people per team, over 42 days, each trying to do 7500 steps a day = 1086km (each step is 0.69m)

Big Team Challenge has over 250 virtual routes to choose from, so there's something in there for everyone, regardless of their fitness levels.

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Get the word out there

Before you can get walking around the countryside of France, or island hopping around the Caribbean, you first have to let everyone know the challenge is even happening.

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Communication with your audience is key part to the success of any step challenge. You will find that your level of involvement directly relates to how much engagement you can expect from your challenge participants.

Some ideas to keep users engaged:

• Weekly or twice weekly email updates to let everyone know of the challenge progress.

• Encourage users to post their progress or achievements on social media using your challenge hashtag

• Run friendly competitions

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Big Team Challenge offers challenge organisers their own admin area, where they can create their challenge, launch a user registration page and even keep in communication with all of the users.

To learn more about our system, watch the video below or get in touch for a personalised demo.

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Running A Virtual Walking Challenge

Staying motivated with a team behind you

Regular exercise can be a great way of staying healthy both physically and mentally, but it can be hard to stay motivated when it's just you. Shorter days, work deadlines and bad weather can all contribute to making you want to stay indoors and simply unwind while watching TV under a blanket, however this can actually lead to feeling worse in the long run. Regular daily exercise is an important part of any self care routine and has been shown time and time again to have an impact on your mental health.

Joining or creating groups with like-minded people can be a great way of motivating each other and encouraging more mindful thinking towards exercise.

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Creating a virtual walking challenge can help make a lasting change

Virtual walking challenges are a great way to begin this process. Participants are encouraged to sign up, create or join an existing team and start tracking their daily step counts. Being a part of a team helps create some friendly motivation, with users encouraged to keep up with their fellow team mates. With the use of team activity, unlock-able achievements and virtual routes they can track their progress along, a walking challenge can be a great way to boost motivation and help change long term attitudes towards exercise.

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Teams leaderboard

The addition of a challenge-wide leaderboard can help extend this competitive element to the wider community, with each team being able to actively compete against others on the challenge.

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Available worldwide

Another benefit of a virtual challenge is that it isn't limited to your local community, it's open to a worldwide audience. Creating a challenge across the globe can be a great way of users connecting with family, friends or colleagues from different countries.

Why not start your own Virtual Walk today?

Learn how to create your own Virtual Walking Challenge on Big team Challenge

Walking challenge at work

A happy and motivated workforce

At Big Team Challenge, our main goal has always been to get staff moving and motivated. It's a simple goal that's easy to achieve and one that's easy to get most of management to agree upon.
From this simple concept, we've built our walking challenge apps to be as fun, intuitive and inclusive as we possibly can.

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Create your own team walking challenge!

You can have your very own walking challenge up and running in a matter of minutes. Simply signup using our online form and get instant access to your very own admin area. From here you can use our challenge creator to set up your challenge, choose your route and pay instantly.

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Virtual walking routes

Our library contains over 220 virtual walking routes, which are free to use on your paid challenge. Alternatively you can get in touch with us directly and we'd be happy to discuss creating a custom walking route for your corporate walking challenge.

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Download our walking challenge app

Big team challenge is not only available online via our web service, but also through our very own iPhone and Android apps, which users can download for free.

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Find more information about our Walking Challenges

Million step challenge

Walking a million steps

A million is still one of the those wonderfully ambitious numbers that still draws us in, which is why it's not surprising that a lot of our customers use this number as a bench mark for their walking challenge. Getting a group of your employees or friends together and into teams to try and collectively walk a million steps together is such a fun goal to strive for and one that lends itself so easily to good marketing. Using our step challenge apps and website, users can easily track their own steps and automatically add them to their team's total.

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Team Step Challenges

Let's break down the number and see what sorts of challenges you could run that would end up with a million steps.

A walk for teams of 4 over 4 weeks.

A million steps would lends itself great to a 4 week challenge, for teams of 4. Over the course of this time an average team would collectively walk around 1,00,000 steps together. We have a number of routes that would perfectly for this, such as Brittany, Sri Lanka and the Golden Triangle. You can see some information about these below.

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Step Challenge Pricing

To run one of our standard step challenges can be as little as £500 / €600 / $700 for up to 100 users. Why not check our pricing page to get an instant challenge quote and more information.

Workplace Walking Challenge

Get your employees moving with a step count challenge

Getting a workplace's employees active, healthy and happy is an incredibly important part of any responsible employer, but finding out where to start is often as hard as actually doing it!

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Make it simple and choose walking

Walking is one of the most easily accessible ways of keeping fit. It doesn't require any specialist equipment, you can do it alone or in groups, and you can even do it in your own house if you want! There are numerous studies showing the benefits of walking on both physical and mental well being, but the important take away is that it is gentle on the body. This is great when you are trying to be inclusive of a large workforce with differing levels of mobility and physical fitness.

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The ease of a step count

One of the biggest benefits of running a step count challenge is that you can simply increase your daily step count as you get more confident with your walking. Participants in a walking challenge are in charge of their own goals and can use their daily step count as a metric to push themselves as the weeks go on.

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Build your own challenge

Big Team Challenge allows you to build your own walking challenge.

Choose from over 200 virtual routes
Set team sizes
choose when it starts and ends
upload your logo
create and edit teams
and much more

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Sign up for free

You can sign up for your free account today and try out our challenge creator. You'll only ever need to pay if you want to publish your challenge.
Sign Up

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Get an instant quote

Use our online step count challenge pricing form to get an instant quote, or chat with in person with an advisor

Team building exercise with a step challenge

Team Building Remotely

We are entering a new era for businesses around the world with more and more of the workforce moving to remote working. This is an exciting prospect and has an incredible amount of positive aspect for employees such as less commuting time, lower expenses and home comforts! But it also comes with its losses. A large one of these is the social aspects that a shared workplace brings to its employees.

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Connecting With Your Team

Creating team building exercises is a great way to engage with your workforce and build connections between your teams that you may have lost with everyone moving to remote working. Building these bonds between your teams is incredibly important for morale and employee motivation. The relatively low costs of these initiatives can bring in huge financial returns in the form of increased productivity, lower sick days and greater mental wellbeing.

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Create A Step Challenge To Help With Your Team Building

Big Team Challenge allows you to create your very own tailored step challenge online. Our system allows your users to register online or via the app, create or join an existing team and track their steps along a virtual map around the world. This is a fantastic way of not only contributing towards your employee wellbeing program and healthy working lives initiatives, but help build friendly competition between teams as they each track their steps and compete on the leaderboard.

Learn more about our corporate team building challenges

Or view our pricing to learn just how little it costs

Our Step Challenge Statistics

Overview

We recently did a deep dive into the statistics of Big Team Challenge and discovered a lot of surprising facts about our walking challenges.
These include: how our customers run their own step count challenges, how many users are web versus mobile apps, and just how many steps we're tallying each day!

You can find these on our newly created statistics page, which we'll be updating regularly moving forward.

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New Year, New Step Count Challenges

Our year has had an incredible start so far, with more people creating walking challenges than ever before!
So far in 2021, on average, we've seen 101 new registrations every single day! That's incredible and just goes to show that even in the cold winter months, people are creating new exercise challenges for their friends, family and employees to get them moving!

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New Virtual Walks

We've been busy in the digital workshop building new virtual routes all around the world for you to use for free.
You can find all of these by signing up to your own free admin account and creating as many draft exercise challenges as you like.
You can sign up at https://app.bigteamchallenge.com/signup-form with no obligation to pay. You will only ever be asked for payment details when you want to publish a challenge and make it live.

Employee Wellbeing Team Challenges

Healthy And Happy Employees

It is estimated that around 27 million working days were lost to in 2017/18 due to work-related ill health, with almost one and a half million people suffering from a work-related illness.
Fostering a corporate mentality that places focus on employee wellbeing has shown to help reduce stress, anxiety and injury within the workforce.

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Structuring support from the top down

Government guidelines suggest that support for employees mental wellbeing as well physical should start from the very top, with management being made aware of the importance of the subject. Without this, making any sort of lasting change within any organisation will be an uphill struggle.

With the support of upper management in place, line managers and supervisors are the next piece of the puzzle. These roles are critical in scheduling and maintaining a well balanced work load for their team, ensuring that while everyone is productive, no one is burdened and overworked.
A good line manager should always have the health and well being of their team at the forefront of their mind. The evidence out there shows that when a team member is off work from work-related illness, that it will greatly impact the business more than having simply spread the work over more staff or a longer period of time.

Then comes the main workforce itself and helping to change the minds of the employees to recognise healthy work and life behaviours.

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There is no "one size fits all" approach

Making this lasting change within the core workforce isn't as simple as ticking some boxes and emailing out some helpful links.
Positive and lasting change will come from a number of maintained company policies such as regular training on workplace injuries, mental health counselling and check ups, access to employee benefits for exercise and relaxation, and much more.

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Big Team Challenge's contribution

Big team challenge has been designed to work seamlessly with existing corporate structures to help make a positive change to employees perception of healthy living.
Employees can get in to teams, track their steps, sync with fitbit and iphones, encourage each other to get moving on their lunch breaks or days off, and start making a change to their daily activity.

We've seen great results with our employee step count challenges and high levels of participation throughout the challenge. Not only is it a great way to help improve a company's physical health levels, but regular exercise has been shown to improve participants mental well being too.

Challenges can be up and running within an afternoon and be accessed by any number of employees, departments, and even countries all around the world.

Why not check out our pricing page to find out more.

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Planned Development: Syncing With Garmin

Adding to our list of wearable smart devices

At Big Team Challenge our long term goal is always to build a system which utilises as many technologies and devices as possible so that our users can have the best possible experience.

When participants sign up to join a walking challenge on our system they currently have the option to connect to either their Fitbit account to track their smart pedometers activity, or to sync up with their Apple and Android smart phone apps (Apple Health and Google Fit respectively). This is fantastic for the majority of our users as this allows them to track their progress seamlessly by automatically pulling in their steps from their devices and adding it to their team's total. This leaves them more time to focus on maintaining motivation and pushing their team mates to be more active.

Moving forward with Garmin

Garmin smart watches and GPS tracking devices are an incredibly popular device with runners and outdoor enthusiasts around the globe. This is why it only makes sense for us to bring that functionality into our step count and exercise challenges. We're working closely with the Garmin development team to help enable this feature for future challenges. When we've completed this feature and done sufficient testing, it will be great to launch it and see the response from our participants around the world.

Strava and other exercise apps

While we don't currently have integration with Strava and other activity apps, we do have them on our development road map and will always strive to be as connected as possible to such services in the future.

If you have any ideas or requests, please let us know as we're always looking at ways to make our system better.

Corporate Challenge