The Workplace Step Challenge and How to Create Your Own

When it comes to encouraging physical activity in the workplace, it’s important to create employee wellness programs that will motivate your colleagues to get active.  Step challenge is a fun way to start with. Step challenges encourage healthy habits in and outside of the workplace, create healthy competition and increase motivation throughout the organization.

Team members in the modern workplace are constantly surrounded by screens and desks and most office employees spend ~70% of their workdays sitting. A workplace step challenge is a great way for employers to support employee health and encourage work-life wellness. What is a workplace step challenge? Why does it matter? And finally, how to organize a workplace step challenge and how to succeed in creating awesome one? In this blog post, we’ll answer these questions—and more. 

What is the workplace step challenge?

A workplace step challenge is a company-sponsored team-building event that challenges employees to track and record the number of steps they take daily or over a certain period of time. At its core, a workplace step challenge is all about encouraging physical activity among your colleagues and helping them achieve their health goals and improve wellness.

What are the benefits of the step challenge for workplace?

1. Employee engagement: Step challenges offer a straightforward and thrilling way for almost every employee to take part.
2. Employee Wellness: It's an exciting opportunity to enhance the overall physical well-being of each employee.
3. Building a sense of community within the remote work or hybrid model - office workers and remote employees alike can join in.
4. Team cohesion: Participating together in competitions fosters team spirit.
5. Motivation: Empower employees to accomplish their goals, one step at a time!
6. Challenges unite - a positive dose of competition actually fosters a sense of community for a common challenge and goal!

How to Organize a Step Challenge at Work?

Effortlessly create an online step challenge in just a few minutes:

1. Sign up for an organizer account on Distantrace.com platform.

2. Set up your Challenge: Choose from various challenge types, like team grouping or creating a virtual map.

3. Share the Link: Once the challenge is set, a unique link will be generated to invite colleagues for participation.

4. Registration: Participants need to register on distantrace.com, join the challenge, and download the mobile app.

5. Join the Step Challenge: Easily track your daily steps, calories burned, and distance covered with our user-friendly mobile app - Distant Race (available on Google Play/App Store). Compete individually or as part of a team.

Click here to create your own step challenge!

Best practices for a Workplace step challenge

With a little planning and preparation, you can create a fun and engaging step challenge that your employees will be excited about. Here are a few tips to keep in mind to help you get started:

1. Set Challenge Rules and Goals

Before you do anything else, you’ll want to determine how employees can participate in the step challenge and the general rules for participation. A few things you should consider include:

• What the step goal is each day: It’s common to choose 10,000 steps a day. If your employees participate as a team, consider increasing the step goal.
• How long the challenge will last: It can last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to the whole year.
• Whether your employees can participate in teams or as an individual’s: You can choose to count each person’s steps individually, or you can combine all the steps from a department or team.
• A fun method to encourage more walking is by incorporating a "THE GOAL" element into the challenge. You or your employees can select a destination they'd like to "walk to," and the aim is to reach that location through steps by the end of the challenge. It's a friendly approach that involves the entire workplace!

2. Determine Rewards and Milestones

Sometimes, there are rewards or wellness goods for the person with the most steps, or everyone's steps contribute to a collective reward for all participants. Employees may be more motivated to participate in a step challenge at work if there are rewards or incentives (or other motivation busters) they can work towards. Here are a few ideas you could consider: 

• Monetary rewards
• Gift cards
• Free lunch or other heathy goods
• Company party
• Company dinner etc.
• Creative rewards (recognition based). Consider that sometimes a simple public recognition post on an internal or social network, works wonders for motivation too! You can celebrate milestones such as the halfway point during the challenge or the first person or team to hit 10,000 steps!

Ideas to Promote Walking at Work

In most cases, employees will struggle to get more steps each day when they are sitting at a desk from 8am-5pm. A good way to promote your step challenge while also increasing engagement is by promoting walking at work with unique ideas. Here are few ideas below:

•           Promote walking meetings

•           Suggest taking the stairs

•           Offer information on nearby walking trails

•           Provide incentives for achieving the most steps each week

•           Encourage employees to walk to and from work

""All for one, and one for all" - the ideal motto for a workplace step challenge. Enjoy, compete, and unite people to achieve individual and company goals!