Launching a one-off corporate fitness challenge takes some thought and preparation, just like any other project. You may want to launch a challenge to boost morale, encourage movement, or raise awareness (and donations) for a charity. The type of challenge, the reason for it, your goals and targets – these require some planning before launching. In this article, we’ll walk you through some of the questions and considerations you should ask yourself when planning a one-off corporate fitness challenge.

Choosing your challenge type

The first question to ask yourself when you start thinking about setting up your first company wellness challenge is simply: What kind of challenge do you want to set? The two main types are step-based and activity-based challenges.

Step-based Challenges

Step challenges are just what you’d expect: tracking the total number of steps your participating employees take over a certain period. With CorporateFitness.app, whether through users’ preferred step-tracking method or our app, steps are automatically counted and synced to the challenge page. This makes participation simple for users who already have an Apple Watch, Fitbit, or other fitness wearable.

You can choose to do a pre-designed challenge where the steps taken by the collective are plotted onto one of our virtual maps such as European Landmarks or Route 66. You can even choose to create your own virtual map based on the locations of your offices and/or their local landmarks.

Activity-Based Challenges

Activity-based challenges are much broader in scope: they can effectively be whatever you want them to be. These types of challenges allow participants to engage through step count and other fitness activities, such as swimming, yoga, or strength training. Additionally, activity-based challenges can be separated into two main categories – Distance-based and Time-based – with varying levels of inclusivity.

A Distance-based challenge requires participants to actively start and stop an activity. Often recorded using GPS or ‘real world’ data, everyday steps do not count towards these distances. A Distance-based challenge takes engagement a step further as it requires participants to deliberately engage in distance activities… Participants would actively engage through ‘starting’ and ‘stopping’ activities on their device or app. You can choose to set a goal distance for your participants to work towards, or you can choose an open-ended challenge to see just how far your team can get .

A Time-based challenge collects data on time spent moving. Time-based challenges tend to be more inclusive because participants with any level of fitness can record their activities equally. For example, there is no difference in record between someone who walks their dog for an hour and someone who runs for an hour. They also allow for much broader movement to be tracked by time such as yoga, strength training, or boxing.

Wellbeing Challenges

A Wellbeing challenge can be considered the most inclusive of all the challenges because it allows you to record not only movement but also healthier lifestyle choices. For example, someone with limited physical ability might use the challenge to focus more on mindfulness or minimizing screen time. Someone who is known for being a workaholic might focus on spending more time being social. With a focus on more holistic wellness, Wellbeing challenges allow both you and your team to stretch the limits of your comfort zones.

Determining your goals and duration of the challenge

There are two goals that you should keep in mind when you are planning your one-off fitness challenge. The first is your greater intention for the challenge, be it raising awareness for or supporting a charity, encouraging movement among your employees, or simply improving general wellbeing and morale. Once you’ve defined this first goal, it will be easier to determine the duration of the challenge.

If you are raising awareness for or supporting a charity, it will be important to discuss with their team to know what campaigns and events they have planned so that you can plan your challenge accordingly.

If you want to encourage movement or improve general wellbeing and morale, the timing might coincide with or fit between other company wide campaigns or events.

Additionally, it’s important to determine whether you want to quantify your goals on an individual, team, or collective level. This will depend on whether you’re interested in fierce competition or collective betterment during the duration of the challenge. How interested you are in competition will inform whether you goals to be individual, team, or collective. It will also inform how you choose to publish your results, which we’ll discuss in the next section.

Don’t forget: if it’s team goals you’re after, you’ll also have to think about how you want to define your teams. Will it be per department, per office location, or would participants have the option to create their own teams based on their interpersonal relationships with colleagues across departments.

Leaderboards

Based on what kind of targets you want to track, you can choose different leaderboards to display results. When you’ve decided between individual, team, or collective goals, or perhaps a mix, you can then split your leaderboards accordingly.

For individual goals, you can set daily and/or weekly targets for each participant. Depending on the level of competitiveness you are interested in, you can choose one of a few options. If you’re interested in high competition, you can choose a ranked leaderboard of all participants. If you’d like to add a sense of competition to encourage top scorers without setting your more average participants apart, you could choose a ranked leaderboard of only the top 10, 20, or 50 participants.

For team goals, you have similar decisions to make based on how you’ve determined your teams. When you choose teams based on office location, you could also create sub-leaderboards based on departments to harness some intracompany competition between departments.

When your goals are collective, your leaderboard will essentially be akin to a progress board. This will give all participants to see how the larger team is progressing towards the collective goal.

At the end of the line, depending on how competitive you want your fitness challenge to be, it will also be important to decide if you want to make your leaderboards visible or private. A visible leaderboard will allow participants to see everyone’s progress whereas making leaderboards private will allow participants to see only their own progress. When you’re interested in inclusivity over competition, there is also an option to hide leaderboards altogether so participants can only see their own progress.

Making it happen

So now you have all this information but what do you do with it? Well, there are a few ways to approach creating a corporate wellness challenge with CorporateFitness.app.

You can choose the self-service option which is essentially plug-and-play with the most basic of our features. Step-tracking, device integration, leaderboards, an event dashboard to publish information to your participants, and an event feed for participants to share photos or video snippets from their experiences during the challenge. With the self-service option you’ll have access to some of our pre-designed challenges to keep things engaging for your participants. Additionally, you can take advantage of our knowledge base to guide you through the setup process. This is a great option for small teams of less than 100 participants.

However, the larger the organization, the more participants there are. And with larger numbers there is a lot more to think about. For medium and large businesses, we advise choosing one of our support plans.

Our Setup-Service plan gives you everything in the Self-service plan, but rather than relying on our knowledge base, our team will provide all the support you need to get started. We will setup the app environment to your specifications and give you a training session on how everything works. This will save both time and energy for your challenge team.

Our most comprehensive is the Full-Service plan. With everything the Self-Service and Setup-Service plans have to offer, our team will also provide more support across the duration of your challenge as well as support your challenge coordinators through the decision making process from conception to completion. . This is the preferred option for larger, often multinational, organizations.

Are you ready to get your team moving? Don’t wait! Contact us to schedule a call or demo today.