Healthy Living

Getting healthy and motivated in 2024

2024 has begun and what better time to think about chnaging your daily habits for the rest of the year.

January can be a daunting period of time for everyone; with thoughts about jobs, family, healthy living, and how to shake off the winter blues occupying a lot of our brain power. A great way to help all of your employees find their focus and get motivated for the year ahead is to run an inclusive health and wellbeing initiative such as a corporate step challenge.

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The benefits of a winter step challenge

The darker nights and the colder days can be a real turn-off for a lot of people during the long winter months, which is why engaging in group activities can be a real benefit to your workforce. Encouraging a little firendly competition with team and individual leaderboards, activity-based achievements, and virtual maps can be a great way to motivate your employees to get moving when they otherwise might not. Team challenges are not only a great way to help get everyone active and moving, but can be a fantastic team building opportunity too, with users encouraging each other and building up lines of communication that might not have existed before.

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Creating your own step challenge

Creating your very own step challenge takes only a couple of minutes using our Set Up Wizard. Simply sign up for a free admin account at https://app.bigteamchallenge.com/signup-form and begin using our challenge creator to customise your challenge to your needs, find a virtual route that suits you, and publish whenever you are ready. You'll only ever be asked to pay when you are ready to launch your challenge, so play around and explore the options that we've built into our system.

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Looking to chat with someone?

We underdstand that it can be a little daunting to run a step challenge for the first time, which is why we offer a free call to go over the systems features and discuss your ideas. Drop us a mnessage today to book your call and learn more about our step challenge software.

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Planting new trees for our customers

Big Team Challenge are proud to announce that as of September 2022, we will be planting 1 tree for every 5 participants that join one of our customer's challenges.

As part of larger ongoing project to reduce our climate impact, we've partnered with Ecologi to help plant trees all around the world and help with biodiversity. We're hoping that with our contribution of 1 tree per 5 participants, as well as our own personal donations, that we'll be able to plant over 5,000 trees in our first year, which we hope will go a long way to creating a greener environment for our users all around the world.

Our new admin system will also be able to tell organisers exactly how many trees they will have helped plant by running their step challenge, helping to spread the good news.

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Reducing our impact further

As a technology company we benefit from having very few environmental impacts from our operation; with our teams being able to work remotely, no manufacturing considerations, and a purely electronic communication and marketing setup. However that's not to say we can't be doing better.

Moving to greener energy

One of our largest considerations is the data centres we use to run our systems and the energy consumption involved with powering these. We're currently researching alternatives to our current providers and looking at hosts who use 100% renewable energy. We believe this will help bring down our carbon footprint even further and provide a more sustainable option for us as a company in the long run.

Encouraging more from our participants

Our step challenges have always been focused on getting people more active in their daily lives to improve their long term health. But perhaps there is more we could be doing, such as encouraging users to swap their daily driving commute for public transport, or researching other ways in which they can stay active while also helping their wider community with green projects.

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We're really excited to announce this new step at Big Team Challenge, but it's just one of many we plan to make in the coming years as we grow as a company and we can't wait to announce more!

To get your employees moving and help make things a little greener, why not sign up for your own corporate step challenge and see how many trees you can help plant.

What is active travel?

Active Travel is a funding and information program set up by the UK government to support expenditure on cycling and walking infrastructure. This funding is available for local authorities in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as private businesses.

Learn more about Active Travel

Active Travel Step Challenges

Changing peoples habits on travel can be a long journey and one that should be approached from a variety of different angles. A great first step can be introducing a fun health initiative to try and reprogram how your participants think about their daily activity. Step challenges can be a great way of helping people think about increasing their daily step count by introducing the idea of personal goals and achievements. Combining this with materials to help your users ditch the solo car journeys for a walk to the nearest bus, or hopping on the bike for the daily commute, can be a great way to boost healthy living habits.

Accessibility and inclusion

At Big Team Challenge we take accessibility seriously and believe that exercise challenges should be as open and inclusive as possible to all users, regardless of their physical or mobility levels. To help make our steps challenges as inclusive as possible, we introduced our "activity conversion chart" to help users convert a variety of different physical activities into a comparable step count. These activities include yoga, aerobics, wheeling (wheelchair), pilates and much more.

Chat with one of our team members

Would you like to talk to one of our team members at Big Team Challenge about your own Active Travel initiative? Get in touch today

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.

Group Walking Challenge

With summer fast approaching, now is a great time to start a team walking challenge with your friends, family or community group. With lockdown still restricting our activity choices at the moment, walking is great alternative that is free to do, accessible anywhere and has a very low impact on joints. Read more about what the UK NHS has to say on the matter: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/walking-for-health/

Creating a walking challenge on Big Team Challenge takes less than 5 minutes and you can instantly have your friends signing up online and setting up their own teams. This is a great way of building some friendly competition between teams as you all try to cover the same virtual route together.

Everyone participating in your challenge will have access to both our website version and the mobile apps too, allowing them to keep track of their and everyone else's progress while at home or on the go!

Challenge Features

• Private to only you and your participants
• Admin area to control and monitor your challenge
• Access to website and app
• Create or join teams
• Track your steps manually or use a smart watch like Fitbit, Garmin or Apple Watch.
• Earn achievements
• Teams Leaderboard

Read more about our step challenge features

Walking Together This May

We're ramping up to May 2021, when we will see the UK launch it's annual National Walking Month! That means shaking off our winter routines and embracing the new spring weather. Read more about National Walking Month

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Step Challenge

One of the easiest ways to get everyone involved this year is to run a walking challenge for your family, friends and community. Walking has so many wonderful health and mental wellbeing benefits, and is one of the easiest forms of exercise to get started with.

Creating your own challenge takes minutes with Big Team Challenge's 'Challenge Creator'. This allows you to choose how many participants can join, how long the challenge lasts for, what route you can walk and much more.

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Our New Virtual Walks

To celebrate the UK and National Walking Month, we have created 4 new routes, each specifically around ones of the 4 countries.

Walk Northern Ireland

Walk Scotland

Walk England

Walk Wales

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.

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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Creating motivation through friendly competition

After several years of data and hosting dozens of challenges for various councils, health boards, charities and private companies, we've come to learn a few things about building motivation.

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Teams Versus Teams

Big Team Challenge aside from being a simple step count challenge system, allows you to choose two forms of team building. The first–and arguably our most popular–is Teams Vs. Teams.
In this mode, all of your employees or participants get into teams ranging from 2 to 10 in members. Each team is then trying to complete the same virtual route as every other team in the challenge.
Teams are able to see other team's progress on the leaderboards, and can therefore build some friendly competition between each other.

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One Big Challenge

Our latest update is the new "One Big Challenge" mode. Much like Teams Vs Teams, everyone gets into a team of their own with their friends or family, and works together to increase their team's distance total. However the crucial difference here is that instead of each team working their solitary way across a virtual map, every team on the challenge contributes to pushing the whole challenge a long one single map. So while every team can still keep track of every other team and push motivation within their own, they are contributing to a firendlier version of the challenge where everyone is helping get the challenge completed.

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Giving out prizes

While everyone should be a winner simply for competing and engaging in some company fun, perhaps you want to hand out some prizes too to sweeten the pot.
We always discourage from giving a prize to the "number 1" on the leaderboard as it can be unfair on those that tried their very hardest but are perhaps older or have a reason they can't run 26 mile marathons every weekend.
This is why we built in detailed reporting so you can choose instead to reward anyone who perhaps added distance every day, or you could give prizes to three people at random who added 20000 steps over the course of a specific weekend.

Getting employees moving again

As we enter the eighth month of Covid restrictions it's easy to get into a comfortable pattern and lose motivation. With winter encroaching this is even more present as the nights draw in and the sun all but vanishes during the working day. So why wait another 2 months for the new year to set goals and get things in gear?

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Changing up the routine

They say it takes 30 days of a new habit for it to stick. That means that in a single month an individual can build lasting change to their physical and mental well being. This doesn't mean that everyone needs to jump in with both feet first, these changes can start off small. How about changing up a morning routine to get up just 20 minutes earlier to enjoy a short walk and a little more of the sunshine before work? Or swapping out the morning toast and jam for a healthier alternative like porridge...with a little jam as a treat.

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Creating a challenge to help

Big Team Challenge is built to help with these changes to participant's habits. Having a team behind you helps build motivation and encourages you to make sure you are contributing fairly. With our challenges running from 28 to 84 days long, we can help your employees or community stay active each day and build those connections. Our step count challenges allow users to see how many steps they have walked each day, compare that to their team mates, earn achievements and unlock milestones.

Keeping up with health initiatives

More and more often we are seeing governments adopting or updating their current health guidelines for local councils and NHS health boards to include workplace and community health challenges. Not only does it seem that the evidence is pointing towards physically healthier staff and citizens, but an increase in productivity and mental wellbeing.

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Healthy Working Lives

The Scottish government have gone one step further and produced and entire online resource and award system for employers to engage with. This website gives fantastic advice about how to not only get your staff active and moving, but all of the benefits associated with doing so.

https://www.healthyworkinglives.scot/Pages/default.aspx

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Mental Wellbeing - and the importance of getting away from your desk!

A core reason for the development of Big Team Challenge was a way of helping companies find a way to help relieve some of the stress that comes with working in an office environment. In the last 30 years there has been a dramatic shift from and active labour intensive workforce to that of a sedentary office based one. With this change comes a dangerous chance that the population as a whole will be much less active during their working lives. It's important that employers are active in getting their staff engaged in regular daily exercise, whether this is swapping their car ride for a bike, or something as simple as parking further away and getting in more steps before and after work. However, it's not solely the employees' attitudes that needs to change, employers need to think about how they are affecting the mental wellbeing of their staff too. Building policies in place to encourage regular breaks stressful activities is a great way to get started. Perhaps start with putting rules in place to enforce breaks from screens and phone calls and getting those who can to do a quick lap around the building?

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To find out how much a bespoke Work Place Challenge might cost you, use our handy Pricing Calculator for free.

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We're walking to the moon and back again (and then there and back.... yet again).

We reached another exciting goal at Big Team Challenge this week: we reached over 7 billion steps walked together with all of our partners and their participants.

That means that we've collectively walked, cycled, ran, swam, rolled and jazzercised our way to the moon and back again... in fact we're on our return journey for the second time!

We would like to thank our clients for joining us and returning to us year after year and making this big milestone possible.

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An average step count of around 10,000 steps per participant

We always hear that number passed around a lot as a good target for everyone to achieve for their daily exercise goal. However, after pouring over our anonymised statistics, we actually found that our participants on average were exceeding this!

This is wonderful news for both us and our challenge organisers. It helps illustrate that Big Team Challenge can help build lasting change in participants, and even help maintain healthy attitudes to pushing yourself further.

How covid-19 can lead to a healthier workplace

The restrictions that Covid-19 has placed upon almost every workplace is completely unique to an entire generation, but perhaps there's opportunity to be found behind it all.

In March the UK Government began imposing tighter restrictions on workplaces and a nationwide lockdown began, but at Big Team Challenge we saw a dramatic change: we saw an increase in new and existing employers signing up to use BIg Team Challenge.

Keeping communication flowing and staff engaged

With entire workforces being made to work remotely, it was understandable that office managers might think that productivity would slip, exercise routines would go out of the window and the health of their employees would suffer. This led to a lot of HR staff getting in touch and asking how they could integrate Big Team Challenge into their work places and get staff engaged.

The reports are in...

With each new challenge that's being run by our clients during Covid lockdown, we're getting excellent feedback on how our platform has left their teams with a great sense of friendly competition and increased motivation.

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Read about one such experience