Healthy Living Blog

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.

Introducing the new iPhone widget

When iOS 14 was launched earlier in the year our team went into their usual high gear whenever a new operating system is announced, ensuring our app would continue to work uninterrupted. This latest iOS release also meant that our design and development team also got a fun new opportunity to plan and build a whole new feature: the homescreen widget.

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What's a widget?

Apples new widget feature allows developers to build small little apps that run on your phones homescreen and pull in small pieces of information from within the main app. In our case we decided the most fun and helpful feature would be to pull in your step count and team progress straight into the widget. Therefore users at a glance can see exactly how they're doing that day without having to open the app.

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.