Corporate wellness challenges are a powerful way to encourage employee engagement, foster team spirit, and promote a more active lifestyle. With CorporateFitness.app, you can create customized, interactive challenges that motivate participants to take care of their well-being. After over 3,500 successful events across more than 1,000 organizations, we’ve put together the key best practices for running a corporate fitness challenge that resonates with all participants and drives long-term engagement.

Set Goals and Expectations

Before getting to the nitty gritty of launching a challenge, it’s important to define your objectives. What do you want to achieve through this challenge—greater participation, more movement, enhanced team bonding?

Having a clear purpose will guide your approach to communication, leadership involvement, and challenge design. It will help you ensure that participants understand what they’re working toward and how they can contribute to the overall success of the challenge.

Engage Senior Leadership

The involvement of senior leadership is not only important for organizing a company-wide event, but it can also significantly boost engagement in your challenge. When leaders actively promote, participate in, and encourage participants, it sets a tone of importance and fosters a culture of wellness within the organization.

Stary by encouraging senior management to talk about the challenge in company-wide, to send out motivational emails, or to post updates on internal communication channels. Their visibility shows that your upcoming challenge, and wellbeing, is a company-wide priority.

Once the challenge has started, encourage senior leaders to take part in the challenge and share their progress in the Event Feed. Their participation can inspire others to join and create a ripple effect across the organization.

Establish Clear and Consistent Communication

Effective communication is the backbone of any successful corporate fitness challenge from the moment the challenge kicks off to its final day. A regular cadence of communication will help to keep the challenge top of mind, especially when managing a long-term challenge.

As previously mentioned, be transparent about your goals for the challenge. Whether you’re aiming to boost participation, enhance team collaboration, or focus on movement, setting clear objectives helps participants understand the purpose of the challenge. The more they understand the challenge, the more likely they will be to engage with it.

Setting a communication schedule with regular emails, in-app notifications, or company-wide announcements is a great next step. These messages will remind participants of the challenge’s progress and upcoming milestones. For email templates, check our Communications Hub.

Last but not least, make sure to provide regular goal updates, highlight top teams or performers, and post motivational messages on the Event Feed to help boost morale and keep everyone on track.

Organize Sub-Challenges to Keep Engagement High

Integrating sub-challenges throughout a longer event helps sustain participant engagement. Sub-challenges like a Selfie Challenge, Fitness Challenge, or Daily Goal Challenge can help to break up the challenge and create small pockets of extra motivation. Consider placing these sub-challenges at key moments of the event, such as at the halfway point or in the last week, to keep participants motivated.

Appeal to Different Interests and Motivations

Not all employees are driven by the same metrics or activity types. Every group of participants is bound to have those who are motivated by fierce competition, and those who are simply looking to add some consistent movement into their daily lives. To ensure broader participation, it’s essential to diversify the aspects of the challenge.

You can achieve this by designing your challenges in a way that welcomes everyone—regardless of fitness level. Mixing movement goals (like daily steps or total distance) with wellbeing goals (like daily meditation or reading) can provide the perfect playing ground for all your participants. Whether it’s a focus on team spirit, mental health, or simple daily habits, everyone should feel they can contribute in their own way.

Conclusion

Running a successful fitness challenge with CorporateFitness.app requires more than just setting up a competition—it’s about creating an environment where employees feel supported, motivated, and engaged. By setting clear goals, involving senior leadership, consistent communication, encouraging participation, and offering diverse participation options, you can ensure that your challenge is both enjoyable for everyone involved and successful.

Ready to kick off your next corporate fitness challenge? Contact us today for more advice on how to make the most of CorporateFitness.app or to schedule a demo.