Wellbeing

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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Engaging with your remote workers

With more and more employees working remotely lately, it can be difficult to boost team morale and engage with your friends and colleagues. Creating a team walking challenge can be a great way to start building those connections back up while also creating healthy exercise routines.

Big Team Challenge has been developed to work in tandem with remote participants, with our website and apps available all around the world and easy online sign up to make the process seamless.

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Employee Wellbeing

It's almost universally acknowledged that an active and healthy member of staff is not only happier, but a more productive member of your team. Looking after your workforce's mental and physical wellbeing will likely be financially beneficial to the company in the long run. Using our step count challenge to help build a new attitude towards walking is a great first step in your company's wellbeing plan.

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Different challenge modes

Our walking challenges have two modes of competion: Teams Vs Teams and One Big Challenge. Each has all of your employees getting into teams.

• If you are running a 'Teams vs Teams' challenge, your teams will be competing against each other to complete the same route. This offers some friendly competition and is our more popular option.
• If you are running a 'One Big Challenge', your teams are all contributing to move each other along one big route together. This option is good for smaller challenges of between 100 and 300 users. Any more than 300 and you begin to loop around the world pretty quickly!

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Create your own step count challenge

Get in touch today to learn about our pricing and how our system can be tailored to suit your employees.

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.

Read more about Employee Wellbeing and how it can be incorporated into Big Team Challenge

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

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