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Employee wellness program 

This program enable employers to implement initiatives to promote a culture of working towards good health amongst their workforce. 

In the long term, employee wellness programs offer many benefits including but not limited to increased productivity, reduced likelihood of chronic diseases, reduced healthcare expenses and reduced absenteeism. 

Wellness challenges are one of the essential parts of an effective employee wellness program. They are the activities that encourage healthy lifestyles among employees. They engage employees to be healthier, happier, and more active. Healthier employees are more productive and less likely to take sick leaves. 

Companies acknowledge that a healthy workforce leads to positive work culture, better company image, and better business overall. This is why such challenges are becoming popular, and companies worldwide are starting to enroll their employees for wellness programs. Moreover, creating a workplace wellness challenge requires very little investment. 

In the end, the result is a healthier, productive, and engaged workforce that performs better.

Creating challenges that promote physical activity among your employees. Tasks, like taking the stairs, riding to work, or walking challenges, are easy to do and go a long way in improving employee health. 

Nutritional Challenges 

It is pretty hard for employees to eat healthily at work without any motivation. This is where a nutritional challenge can do wonders for the health of your employees. 

Usually, to curb their hunger, employees order takeaway, which is fast and efficient but unhealthy or they drink tea/ coffee to subsidise the hunger. Restaurant foods are loaded with high calories and drinking a lot of tea/ coffee ends up aggravating hyperacidity.  

• Challenge your employees to pack their lunches from home. By doing this, they can save up on money and eat more healthily. Tell them to eat homemade meals at least four days a week. This way, they can choose to have a “cheat meal” on the fifth day if they want to. 

• Open a canteen or food joint where only healthy food is served and sold. 

• Invite a Nutritionist/dietician regularly to visit the company and advise on healthy food choices and counsel employees individually to help them achieve their nutritional goals. Also Nutritionists can visit the canteen and set the healthy option food menu and can keep a check on the nutritional quality of the food. 

• Create monthly lunch competitions in your workplace where everyone contributes a different healthy  dish to be shared by the group. This creates competitiveness and also helps employees implement healthy eating in their lives. 

Physical activity challenge 

It is tough to balance work life and good health at the same time. Physical exercise is an essential part if you want to lead a healthy lifestyle. But it is hard to find time for the gym when we have to balance work life with family and personal life.

• Open a mini gym or workout place and give employees work hours flexibility to use the gym so that they can use their spare time for physical activity. 

• If there are elevators , ask them to use the staircase instead of elevators. 

• Challenge your employees to train at least five days a week and design a reward program for motivation. 

• Form teams with similar goals and create challenges among them. Reward the teams that complete the most challenges. 

Sleep Challenge 

Sufficient sleep is important for overall health, and it helps reduce stress and the risks of health problems. Not getting enough sleep has dire consequences. Lack of sleep affects mood, judgment, physical and mental function and even shortens life expectancy. 

Make sure your employees are getting enough sleep regularly. Challenge them to get at least 7 hours of sleep every night for 30 days and reward the winners with prizes to keep them motivated. 

Stop Smoking Challenge 

Everyone knows the risks associated with smoking and how bad smoking is for health in general. Smoking is very addictive, and once you start smoking, it’s hard to stop doing it. 

You can help employees who wish to quit smoking by creating challenges aimed at stopping smoking slowly and steadily. As most people can’t quit smoking at once, you can break down rewards into different parts. 

Create challenges and rewards in a progressive manner. For example, break down the challenges for not smoking for one month, three months, six months, one year, and so on. Reward the employees for completing them with increasingly bigger rewards. 

Water Drinking Challenge 

In the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, we forget to drink enough water regularly. This creates lots of health problems in the long run. For optimal health, it is essential to drink sufficient water daily. In my last post I have already explained the importance of hydration. 

• Make sure that your office has easy access to safe and clean drinking water throughout its premises. 

• Create a water drinking challenge within employees. 

• Set a standard, for example, 8-10 glasses daily, and reward employees who reach that goal. 

• Ask employees to replace a soda or juice per day with water. 

Meditation Challenge 

Mental health is as important as physical health. When you are healthy mentally, you have a better outlook towards life, are happier and stress-free in general. 

Meditation is a fantastic way to achieve good mental health. It helps to calm the mind, makes us focused, and reduces stress. 

Challenge your employees to meditate regularly for at least 5 minutes. You can also offer meditation lessons in your office or provide free memberships to meditation classes in your city. 

B +VE  Challenge 

Being optimistic is one of the best ways to be stress-free and keep diseases at bay. Positivity is contagious and does wonders for increasing productivity and morale. 

Challenge your employees to state one thing every day for which they are grateful. Encourage them to share it with their colleagues. 

Reward the employees who have consistently shown their gratitude over the period of a month. You can give them a paid day off to spend time with their family and loved ones 

The Goal 

The goal of a worksite wellness challenge is to promote healthy habits and encourage employees to adopt them. It focuses on employee health and wellness. 

Challenges are only successful when they are fun, and a supportive work environment is present. Such a positive environment helps people to adopt and maintain healthy habits. Therefore, the objective is to gamify health challenges and reward employees