Running an Effective Well-being Challenge

Well-being challenges tend to come up as one of the first initiatives for organizations that want to launch a well-being program. Unfortunately, many organizations are unable to make these events a continually effective tool once the newness of running a challenge wears off.

In this article, we want to share some of our foundational well-being challenge tips to help you run more effective challenges.

If you are struggling to find new challenge ideas, we created a brief guide that can get you thinking outside of the typical “step challenge” box. You can check that out by clicking here.

We have run these and hundreds of others on our robust challenge engine that allows our clients to create an unlimited number of custom challenges for their employees each year.

If you’d like to see what Propel’s challenge capabilities look like, we’d be happy to give you a tour. Schedule a demo with us here.

An important first step when discussing challenges is to clarify exactly what we mean when we say challenge. Many vendors in the well-being space will label a personal or team goal as a challenge.

A person may want to increase their water intake, so they challenge themselves with a goal to drink a minimum number of ounces per day for 30 days. Similarly, they might set a sleep goal, physical activity goal, community service goal, and so on.

This is a personal initiative; no one else is involved. The member sets the goal and tracks progress against that goal.

The ability to set and track goals is certainly an essential element of a well-being program, it’s just not what we mean when we use the word “challenge”.

When we refer to challenges, we mean competitions.

Unlike challenging oneself to meet a goal, a competition involves other individuals, other teams or other groups (depending on how it is set up). There is a leaderboard to track each participant’s progress compared with the others enrolled in the competition.

From an engagement perspective, competitions are tremendously useful and when designed well, they have a strong record of success in engaging employees. They also are highly effective in generating healthy habits that can result in the formation of persistent healthy behaviors.

Why exactly do competitions work to motivate program engagement?

Research has made clear that structured well-being competitions increase participation rates and sustain engagement in well-being programs.

Competitions make well-being programs more engaging because they tap into individuals' intrinsic motivation and competitive nature. This gamification approach transforms mundane activities into exciting ones, keeping employees motivated.

More importantly, competitions require routine, daily engagement over a period of weeks. This routine engagement leads to habit formation which tends to stay in place even when the competition is over.

At Propel, we include callouts on the competition leaderboard page to nudge further engagement and point participants to other relevant resources on the platform.

This targeted placement works to create deeper engagement because participants are seeing this messaging at a point when they are recording their competition engagement and viewing their progress on the leaderboard—a positive trigger that makes them more open to exploring related tools, resources and initiatives.

Can any competition work?

Unfortunately, no. There is a common misconception that if a competition will work to engage employees, then any competition will work.

However, many employees will tell you that they wouldn’t be motivated to compete against their colleagues.

How do we reconcile this?

We believe competitions fall into three categories. These categories motivate people differently, and can be used to elicit engagement from an employee who may say they wouldn’t be interested in competing.

Individual challenges place each employee in direct competition with one another. The ultra-competitive employees within your organization will likely gravitate the most towards this format.

Team challenges divide employees into teams and each of these teams compete against each other. At Propel, our platform allows employees to create their own teams and invite colleagues to join. Allowing employees to form teams uses social bonds already in place to motivate participants to work hard together. Accountability within these challenges is high, with a small number of close colleagues that employees don’t want to let down.

Group challenges align employees to specific groupings within your organization, whether that be by business unit, department, location, or similar division. We find that this challenge works the best for employees who say they aren’t competitive. Even though the challenge does have a competition component, employees are motivated by the desire to help the group around them. It can be used to build tighter bonds between colleagues that can transfer over to the connections needed for work-related interactions.

Each of these challenge types has unique benefits, and you should explore using a combination of these to offer all employees the chance to join in with the type of event they feel the most comfortable in.

However, simply selecting the correct challenge type isn’t all there is to it.

Keep in mind the two goals you should have for every successful competition: (1) get the most engagement possible in the competition that (2) motivates actions likely to result in new healthy habit formation.

This is why competition design is so important.

Launch a competition, and some portion of your population will join. But does that achieve your goals?

Take for example the most common default competition: a steps challenge. Since most people take steps during the day and steps are easy to track, it seems like the perfect choice for a company-wide competition, right?

Maybe, but probably not.

You need to decide what you want to accomplish with a steps challenge. The key is to consider all aspects of your employee profile, company culture and work styles when you are planning a competition. You also need a platform flexible enough to allow full customization that will meet your specific needs.

At Propel, we have many clients that have the majority of their employees in manufacturing facilities or distribution centers or in restaurants or retail stores. Employees in these types of jobs will routinely get 10,000 to 20,000 steps or more every day—just doing their job.

So, while their daily step counts look great on a leaderboard, your competition hasn’t motivated any new behaviors; the employees are simply getting leaderboard credit for something they are already doing.

Likewise, we have clients that do not permit employees (for safety or security reasons) to have their cell phones with them while they are on the job. This means any steps they would be accumulating during the workday can’t be easily tracked or recorded. In this case a steps competition is not a motivator to engagement.

Your competition should be designed to move employees closer to the health goals you have set for them and provide avenues for them to “practice” what they have been learning with your health promotion campaigns.

For example, one Propel client used a focus on mental health to run a well-being challenge that focused on tracking as many outdoor physical activities as possible (hiking, cycling, running, playing sports, etc.), highlighting the intersection between physical activity, being outside, and improving mental health.

This challenged employees to live out what they were being taught.

Find as many ways to design challenges that challenge employees while moving them towards your organizational goals.

Making your challenges even more engaging.

At Propel, we focus heavily on using our clients’ existing corporate brand and culture to build an integrated well-being program.

Many of our clients take advantage of the ability to create a fully custom competition and tie them into their organization’s culture.

For example, we frequently create “map” challenges where participants’ activity motivates them around a map on a tour of the client’s major locations. We also create challenges unique to the organization’s operations.

One of our public utility clients runs a competition where the participants’ activity powers the client’s regional power grids—one at a time as activity levels are achieved.

As participants complete the competition activity, they watch a real-time leaderboard which is a virtual view of the largest city they serve showing sections of the city lighting up and coming to life as power is progressively restored throughout the competition.

For an organization where the core mission is to keep the power to their customers on 100% of the time, a competition that begins with all the power out, generates immediate motivation to do whatever it takes to get that power back on—even if it is only a virtual representation on a leaderboard.

You want your competitions to create buzz, be exciting, accessible and relevant to your culture and your entire population. Selecting the right challenge type, activities, and connecting it with your organization’s culture will deliver superior results.

Implications for the well-being administrator:

• Effective well-being challenges should focus on competitions that engage employees and build sustainable healthy habits.

• Implementing individual, team, and group challenges allows for varied motivation styles, catering to different employee preferences and encouraging broader participation.

• Customizing competitions to align with organizational goals and culture enhances engagement and ensures that challenges contribute to meaningful behavior change among employees.

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We’re committed to discussing challenges common to well-being leaders and presenting practical solutions that increase the wisdom of all well-being professionals.