Healthy employees mean healthy businesses. Offering a wellness program that includes activity tracking and challenges can help reduce health care costs, improve staff productivity and cultivate a company culture where people want to work.
Over the past 10+ years, Walker Tracker has helped companies run successful wellness initiatives. These are a few tips for you when setting up your next challenge:
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- Promote Your Wellness Challenge – Be sure to give yourself time to promote your challenge. Our Customer Success team recommends you send out a teaser about the challenge a month before it starts, and give participants at least 2 weeks to register for your challenge. You can further build excitement by using the promotional materials that we provide which include a digital poster of your challenge and email templates.
- Support Your Company Culture – Wellness programs are unique to each company. Will your employees be more motivated to participate in an individual challenge or a group/departmental challenge? Focus on what will work for your organization’s structure.
- Communicate Frequently – Program Administrators that send a weekly check-in have higher wellness program retention. Topics you can share with participants include:
- Education: Sharing wellness or activity tips can help lead to long-term healthy lifestyle changes. Easily stay in touch with participants by sending emails or posting notices from within your portal. Or select a Wellness Challenge that includes bi-weekly pop-up questions to keep participants engaged. For Enterprise accounts, your Customer Success Manager can provide you with Wellness Communication templates that include facts and Q&A about certain wellness measurements.
- Motivation: Your participants are trying to reach a certain step or points goal, but how do you keep them moving through the duration of a challenge? You can incorporate mini challenges during the overall challenge, send updates on the overall progress or provide weekly incentives that encourage groups to move together and share their progress.
- Nominate Employee Ambassadors – Encourage staff who are enthusiastic about the activity challenge to take on the role of Team Leader. The role could help motivate others with walking meetings, opting for the stairs or simply walking to someone’s desk to ask a question.
- Celebrate Your Success – Reward participants for joining your initiative with a gathering at the end of the challenge. You can share stats, like the number of steps you took as an organization, and congratulate everyone for taking the time to improve their overall health. Recognition goes a long way in formulating long-term healthy habits.
- Use Our Resources – We’re here to help you run your best program yet. You can access the resources you need on the web portal. Turnkey programs can use the Help tab, and Enterprise Programs may use the Help tab or contact your Customer Success Manager*.
We want to hear what has worked for your organization—comment below to share your success stories with us!
*Enterprise programs only.