11 Unique Wellness Campaign Ideas For Your Employees Health

Employee Wellbeing is essential to a successful business. Employers worldwide are focusing on fostering healthy workplace measures to mitigate health hazards due to work.

One such is the introduction of corporate wellness programs that helps in adopting healthy habits more conventionally. At the heart of every wellness program are the healthy habits that one chooses, to maintain a healthy lifestyle. These activities are boosted by wellness campaigns and challenges that drive your employees to get a head start.

According to research by SHRM, 70% of the professionals offered wellness programs for their employees. The trend of wellness programs across all the corporate sectors, the progress of such events depends on your employees.

Before delving all the secrets for engaging wellness campaigns, brushing the basics isn't a bad idea!

What is a Wellness Campaign?

Wellness Campaign is a series of activities undertaken to achieve the state of having a sound body, mind, and spirit. The term wellness challenge and wellness campaigns are often used mutually.

Campaigns should be done with a clear purpose as a long term effect, for example, "financial fitness campaign." It can be a team-based or individual campaign and can last for more than four weeks.

Challenges are goal-specific, which continues for a week of days, for example, "No sugar week challenge."

Importance of Effective Wellness Campaigns

• The wellness campaign supports employees who struggle with their health and weight-related issues.
• It helps in the eradication of bad habits gradually and promotes lifestyle changes.
• It encourages team participation and makes your employees goal-oriented.
• Reduces absenteeism and lesser health insurance costs.
• Sustains high employee morale.

So are you interested in pulling out all the stops for your lucrative wellness programs?

Here I have listed 11 excellent tips to help you engage your workforce with healthy workplace initiatives.

11 ways to engage your employees in wellness campaigns

1. Discovering true Wellness Needs

There are various categories of wellness programs in the market. Hence, it is crucial to know the actual reasons to offer one for your employees. Before that, having a clear idea of employees' demographic like age, gender is important to avoid choosing irrelevant wellness programs.

Like for example: if your employees are non-smokers, you don't need to run the smoke-free campaigns!

Ways to do it:

• Survey Questions: Ask your employees about the type of campaigns they would find useful.

• Identify their engagements: Discover the activities they would like to indulge in, like boot camps, workshops, or formal meets.

2. Making it Fun and Creative

Are you here to make your wellness programs enjoyable?

Not considering fun factors will seriously demote the overall idea of enrolling in one. Making your campaigns exciting and non-technical will ensure maximum engagements.

Ways to do it:

• Personalized campaigns: Who doesn't love special attention? Especially when you create something more employee-centric, it will genuinely encourage your employees to participate in wellness programs.

• Include walking meetings: Make sure to skip the regular board room meeting and try something new. Walking meetings are a great way to combine health and engagement, as well.

Consider using a staff wellbeing board for posting exciting flyers.

3. Creating Healthy Competition at the Workplace

Healthy competitions are inspirational when it comes to learning and developing oneself. Employers can promote competitions among their employees to achieve a task and reward them. These can be departmental or individual games to pump up the entire workforce for the organization's greater good.

Ways to do it:

• Playing a sport: Organising playful events like cricket matches or football sessions for a day will boost the inner athlete among your employees.

• Giving authority: Employees are the face of their organization. Giving them the authority to showcase their best efforts for the organization will make them goal-oriented.

4. Rewards and Recognition

Receiving laurels from the head of the organization in front of other colleagues will boost employee morale. It is a powerful motivation for all your employees to work better in their domain. But it need not always be a reward for completing a task.

Employers can surprise their team with various wellness gifts, like lunchtime tools, stress balls, and fitness trackers, which also helps in developing good health.

Ways to do it:

• Giveaway company-branded swags: Investing in swags for your employees and their family will help you get a personal touch.

• Subscriptions: Giving discounts or memberships to gyms or shopping centers contribute to their happy time.

Suggested Read: 5 Best Ways Rewards For Fitness Can Boost Participation in Employee Wellness Programs

Download our complete guide to rewards and recognition in order to engage, align and recognize your employees to inspire success.

5. Engaging in Corporate Fitness Trackers

Workplace challenges are necessary if you want to keep your employees fit and help them maintain an excellent work-life balance. Technology has made it very simple to track your employees' engagement levels in real-time through apps.

And, employers can introduce their employees to the digital platform of Vantage Fit, the application by Vantage Circle to monitor nutrition and health routines.

It helps in running customized campaigns individually or team in real-time. Employers can monitor app-based campaigns and give rewards and recognition to the employees based on their performances.

6. Get Outdoors

Working for long hours and without breaks can lead your employees to a sedentary lifestyle. This, in turn, will give rise to several health risks like obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks.

Therefore, breaking out from mundane work-life and doing outdoor activities is imperative for employees' productivity.

Ways to do it:

• Organizing Field trips: Field trips can be a learning experience for your employees. Visiting museums, theme parks, resorts, or a vacation to a nearby hill station will revitalize your team and give them a holistic approach to life.

• Team picnics: Organizing office picnics for various occasions like the new year will provide happy times for the entire team, and this will even lead to better peer engagements.

7. Strategic Marketing of Wellness Campaigns

Investing time and money for wellness events and making the purpose successful is the ultimate goal for an employer. But if the game seems tedious and boring, only a few of your employees will participate seriously. Thus, a transparent approach to marketing your wellness campaign is relevant.

Ways to do it:

• Promotion Video: Videos are more engaging than text messages, and making a promo video for upcoming events will keep your employees hooked to the campaigns' visuals and ideas.

• Using online marketing techniques: You may also like to push emails and update events on various other social media sites to grab attention with the help of email marketing crm. You can create personalized email marketing campaign and achieve huge results using cold emails, all inside a CRM.

11 Best Wellness Campaign Ideas To Engage Your Employees
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Email Marketing Campaign: Definition, Strategies & Examples
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8. Volunteering

Engaging in volunteering activities is a great way to build strong beliefs and render services for society. It is a team-building activity that unites the entire community and your employees in achieving a common goal.

Ways to do it:

• Drives and Camps: Setting a clear goal and offering volunteer service for half of the workdays in a week in a nearby locality will uplift the morale of your entire organization in the community.

• Sharing in social media: Clicking photographs and videos and sharing in social media will spread a word among other people for your good deeds.

9. Introducing Health Fairs

A health fair is a great way to promote awareness about health and wellness initiatives. It serves as a mutual corporate perk for the employees and the organization.

Ways to do it:

• Biometric Screening: Doing physical tests in the worksite is a part of the wellness programs. Biometric screening covers the employee's personal health care costs and helps the employers reduce health plan costs by identifying the risk factors way before it becomes dangerous.

• Yoga Sessions: Organizing yoga in the workplace can motivate the purpose of leading a healthy lifestyle. Employers can hire a professional Yoga trainer and provide goodies like a yoga mat, yoga dress, etc., to promote active participation during the health fair.

10. Keep a Health and Wellness Space

Your employees spent the most of their lifetime in offices. Rarely they get their time off to perform health and wellness activities outside the office. Hence keeping room in the office to relax and exercise can help them with rejuvenation.

Ways to do it:

• Make an On-site studio: Gyms within an office or a yoga room will prove lucrative investment on your employees. You may also like to introduce them to workplace ergonomics for a stress-free work environment.

• Lounge: Providing a lounge or hall with comfortable chairs to rest. You may also include health and wellness magazines and juice corners.

11. Active Feedback Sessions

Just organizing a wellness campaign won't suffice the health and wellness goals. Employers often have to go beyond the generic need and engage in proper feedback sessions. Getting honest feedback from employees on the wellness campaign experience will help in rectifying the shortcomings in future campaigns.

Ways to do it:

• Showing Interests: The best way to get feedback is by keeping open and honest communication between the employer and the employees. Show genuine interest to know how your employees feel about the work environment, the health initiatives provided to them, or how you can help them solve their problems.

• Transparency of the Process: Keeping openness of the process and regularly updating your employees about the upcoming events or changes in health plans are important factors of gaining trust.

Campaign Ideas

As an employer there are various campaign ideas you should come up with to engage your employees. Because at the end of the day, employee health is a priority and the end goal is to redefine their habits and make them adopt a healthier lifestyle.

Also, with the pandemic around, every other event is held on a virtual platform. And, Vantage Fit is one such global digital platform which can make virtual campaigns possible. Here, there is a new campaign every week with more than two tasks- be it based on walking, strength or other dietary tasks.

So, let us talk about the various campaign ideas which Vantage Fit offers and you can implement at the workplace for your employees-

1. Virtual Walkathon

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the term “Walkathon”?

That it has something to do with a walk.

A walkathon is indeed a walk, more of a walk-a-thon, i.e. a walking marathon. And when you add the term virtual to it, the meaning gets slightly modified. I mean, it is still a walk and you can do it from anywhere and everywhere, with no big gathering on the same, thanks to the pandemic.

A corporate virtual marathon is arranged through a common digital platform which brings all the employees working worldwide on a single global digital platform. All they have to do is go on walks according to their convenient time and place while being digitally tracked by the virtual tool.

Challenge

Target areas:

• Steps
• Distance
• Calories

How to do it? - Being an employer, assuring that your employees are leading a healthy life is very important. And, Vantage Fit allows you to make sure of that.

Launching a campaign such as a walkathon for your staff is going to mean a great deal to them. You have to start a campaign on the virtual platform and set proper targets for your team.

Give them a specific target of completing a minimum number of steps on a daily basis for a week or so. Also, you can ask them to cover a certain distance by walking, say like 3 kms twice a week. The steps and distance can be easily tracked by the step tracker. Also, with the help of the calorie tracker, each step you take will tell you about the number of calories you burnt.

And, reward your employees on that account like in Vantage Fit, we assign fitness points to each employee on completion of each task.

Once you set certain targets and rewards attached to the challenge, it will push your employees to go for it. Otherwise, no one takes walking seriously. A virtual walkathon will motivate your employees to join the walking club.

2. E-marathon

2020 has been quite an unprecedented year for many and with everything happening remotely, even events like marathons are held virtually.

Like a virtual walkathon, e-marathon is running a marathon while being tracked by digital tools. An e-marathon is conducted so that people can participate in the event from anywhere and is not restricted by a time and place constraint.

As much as walking is easy, running is equally difficult. But today we live in a world where each and everyone is accustomed to having a sedentary lifestyle.

Not everyone gets the motivation, especially after a long day of work, who would want to go for a run?

The fitness enthusiast of course but not the usual people as running becomes tiring for them.

Challenge

Target areas:

• Distance
• Steps
• Speed

How to do it? - Running is a good contributing factor to health. With employee wellness being the topmost priority, employers should consider holding e-marathons and give the employees a chance to run and stay fit.

Do you want your workforce to run a mile? Perfect. Just run this campaign instead and they will be ready.

Ridding your employees off their unhealthy routine should be the main concern. To do that, you simply have to resort to tracking tools and organize campaigns like e-marathons. Give them 10 days at disposal to cover a distance of like 2kms daily along with setting a specific running pace. Without a definite pace, there is no point.

So, you ought to fix a condition like, every employee has to cover a particular distance at a speed of 12mins/km.

In Vantage Fit, e-marathons are basically a weekly routine. So, the step counting, distance covered and pace limit all get tracked on the platform for you to keep record.

Running makes one physically and mentally active. It will rejuvenate your employees and take away the fatigue thereby relieving them from stress.

3. Cycling

Cycling is one activity which not only aims at comforting your body but is a great contribution towards sustainability. Corporates, these days are taking the environment into consideration and are seriously concerned with it.

So, what could be better than organizing a cycling campaign?

The employees will benefit and so will the environment.

Challenge

Target areas:

• Distance
• Speed

How to do it? - The cycling challenge is not that popular because there might be employees who do not know how to ride a bicycle or do not own one. Yet that does not make it any less of a productive challenge. In fact, you can encourage your employees to get one and start riding by conducting such a challenge.

Introduce a cycling challenge and make it interesting by putting rewards or badges at every checkpoint. That way, your employees will get a boost after completing each level and will want to go for more.

The virtual platforms keep a track of the activities as all your employees will be synced to the application once you register.

4. Distance-based Campaigns

Distance based campaigns help you set a clearer goal- it can include walking, running or cycling. In fact, this type of campaign gives you a choice. Proper tasks are given which you just need to finish and then relax.

Meanwhile, the distance will be tracked and you will know how much of the target has been achieved.

Challenge

Target areas:

• Distance

How to do it?- Since the primary focus of this campaign is on the distance irrespective of the activity, it can include challenges revolving around only distance. As an employer, you can organize a campaign where your employees would be required to cover a distance of say 5 km through walking, running or cycling.

The tracker will be able to detect the activities and provide you with accurate figures.

5. Nutrition Tracking

Motivating your employees to exercise and go on walks is a good practice. But not to forget that workout is just one part of wellness while the diet is the other one. Proper nutrition intake is essential, especially when working a job. And, with the current food culture where people prefer junk food over healthy meals, it is more than obvious that obesity is rising at a rapid rate.

Unhealthy diet leads to loss in productivity. If your employees are not fit enough and become lousy, it would adversely affect the company’s work performance.

So when you run campaigns based on meal logging and nutrition tracking, employees get more aware of their eating habits.

Challenge

Target areas:

• Calorie tracker
• Green score
• Protein score
• Water intake

How to do it?- Make your employees conscious of what they eat or drink and how much they eat. A campaign as such will drive them to adopt a healthy diet.

Carry out a campaign where you make your staff log in their meals everyday for a week or two. Lead them into drinking a minimum of 8 glasses of water per day. Also, set a minimum target of achieving a green score so that they do not miss out on their greens. Do not forget to make them track their protein and carbohydrate score too.

Along with setting targets for each, a calorie tracking feature is a must if one needs to track their nutrition. Vantage Fit allows you to log your meals and informs you about the required calorie intake at the same time.

Read more Nutrition Tracker : An Essential Feature for Optimal Wellness

Therefore, the diet tracking challenge can include your employees to log in their meals, water intake, together with green and protein score.

And, this is one of the easiest campaign ideas one can implement in their company for it requires one to finish basic tasks.

Conclusion

Employees are the assets of your organization, and its success depends on the measures you follow to offer a healthy lifestyle. Participation in wellness campaigns depends on the right marketing approaches.

Start by knowing your employees' likes and dislikes, and then curate fun and creative contents. You may also take it outdoors or can enroll in online corporate wellness programs.

Rewards and recognition should award healthy competition among your employees. Most importantly, don't forget to keep the communication open-ended, encouraging honest feedback sessions.

Following the above-mentioned ways to engage your employees in wellness, campaigns can help in employee retention and enforce a healthy work-life.

Now I would like to know from you.

How do you engage your workforce in your wellness programs?

Or you might like to. Either way, let me know in the comment section below!

Download our free guide on Corporate Wellness Programs for implementing a better employee experience.