In the last five years we’ve seen a huge increase in remote and hybrid working trends. The more spread out a team is, the more challenging it becomes to maintain team cohesion across distances.

A fitness challenge might be just what your company wellness initiative needs. Fitness challenges naturally foster teamwork, which can enhance comradery and collaboration in other settings as well. They also contribute to overall health and well-being, regardless of a person’s fitness level. Just adding some extra movement into daily life can make such a difference!

Connecting People Across Offices and Remote Locations

Organizing a fitness challenge creates a shared purpose among employees. When there is a larger goal to reach together, it’s common to see people getting excited to contribute to a larger cause. This can be especially potent if the fitness challenge is paired with a charitable cause.

Challenges facilitate connection by encouraging interactions beyond work tasks. A fitness challenge can help to not only create a sense of community across (long) distances, but also support a more balanced work life.

So, how can you connect your remote teams through fitness challenges? In this blog post, we’re exploring strategies that aim to promote higher participation and engagement rates.

Branding and Customization

Consistent branding provides employees with a sense of pride and connection with your organization. Adding your custom colors and logo to our app creates a more cohesive experience for participants.

Working together with the CorporateFitness.app team, you can customize every screen your participants see from the registration screen to leaderboards. For example, you can customize the text and imagery shown on the registration screen to encourage your participants from their first interaction with our app.

Our customization also allows you to create a comprehensive journey that aligns with the larger message you want to tell with your challenge. Custom content, like short articles or images, enables a deeper engagement with participants by providing them with targeted information and visuals that resonate with the overarching message and participant needs.

Through thoughtful customization, you create a cohesive and engaging journey that aligns with your challenge’s objectives, driving deeper connection and pride among your employees.

Enhancing Participation with Custom Badges

Who doesn’t love a reward? Creating custom badges for your fitness challenge is an excellent strategy to promote engagement and motivation in participants.

Badges allow you to create smaller milestones along the way during a fitness challenge, like reaching a certain distance, a certain number of workouts, or simply rewarding consistency. Breaking the challenge into these smaller milestones is a great way to keep participants moving, especially during a longer challenge.

Bridging Offices Through Virtual Maps

Whether it’s trekking across the solar system or between office locations, custom virtual maps offer the right amount of gamification for increased participation.

Including a custom virtual map helps to make your challenge more immersive, and thus more engaging. Having that added visual representation of participants’ progress between locations, through steps or mileage, enhances a sense of connectedness across long distances. With our Pro plan, you can work closely with the CorporateFitness.app team to create and implement a customized virtual map. From brainstorming about the flow of your map to creating custom badges for each location, our team is here to help you every step of the way.

Promoting Team Collaboration

Creating teams for a fitness challenge is a great way to foster connections. Fully remote or larger teams may not have a chance to collaborate across departments or locations. Team leaderboards in CorporateFitness.app can play a positive role in workplace dynamics.

Self-managed teams can help to create and enhance existing co-worker relationships and give participants a greater sense of autonomy and accountability. Randomly assigned teams are a low-stakes way to get people out of their comfort zones and encourage intraoffice interaction. Whether it’s Marketing vs. Sales or USA vs. UK, departmental or location-based team configurations are great for larger organizations looking to foster inter-departmental or international rivalry. And finally, Pre-assigned teams based on specific criteria or existing groups within your organization are a great option for facilitating targeted team building activities that align with organizational goals.

In addition to the Event Feed that we’ll explore below, a bonus of dividing participants into teams is the team chat function. This is a chat area within the app where teams can get to know each other, encourage each other, and celebrate milestones (big and small), separately from the larger participant group.

Creating a Sense of Togetherness with the Event Feed

The event feed on CorporateFitness.app offers a dynamic and interactive platform that benefits both your organization and your participants.

For the larger organization, the event feed serves as a centralized hub for updates, announcements, and achievements. With it, you can provide real-time communication at key moments during your event – from schedule changes to milestone celebrations. The Feed makes easy for you to keep your participants informed and engaged with your objectives for the challenge.

For participants, the event feed transforms your challenge into a more interactive and socially connected experience. It allows participants to post updates, share achievements, and support one another. This creates an engaging environment that motivates participation and fosters camaraderie while reinforcing a sense of belonging and pride within the organization.

Bottom Line

Running a fitness challenge serves as a dynamic component of your corporate wellness initiative, fostering connections among remote and hybrid teams in today’s dispersed work environments. By integrating elements such as custom branding, badges, virtual maps, and teams, your challenge has the potential to not only encourage your employees to integrate more movement into their everyday lives, but also a powerful means to strengthen team cohesion and morale.

Ready to elevate your team’s connection with a fitness challenge? To see how our tailored solutions can drive participation and foster a healthier, more connected workforce, schedule a demo today!