So, you’re thinking about setting up a fitness challenge but you’re not sure where to start. The first thing you should take into consideration what a successful challenge looks like for your organization.

There are three different ways to determine your overall success: be it recognizing and/or rewarding the top scorers, providing recognition and/or reward to consistent participants randomly, or fulfilling a collective goal. Your definition of success will not only inform the type of challenge you choose to do – be it a step challenge or fitness challenge – but also how intense the spirit of competition will be throughout the challenge.

Spirit of competition

If it wasn’t obvious, rewarding your top scorers will fall into the intense competition category. This could be the path to choose within organizations or teams whose employees are already super athletic. However, it’s not often that you’ll find an organization who has a large percentage of truly sporty people – these numbers are often much smaller than you’d expect.

The benefit of going the hypercompetitive route is that it may help encourage those who are already very active in their lives. However, the cons can be twofold: you run the risk of alienating people who may have lower levels of activities for a myriad of reasons or of participants cheating to get the top spot.

Spirit of inclusion

When you look at success from a more holistic perspective, where consistency and team spirit are paramount, you can include anyone and everyone in a challenge. Whether you’re looking at consistency or striving for a collective goal, every step can count towards success. This makes space for people of all walks of life, and all levels of physical ability.

The more inclusive your challenge, the more likely you are to have high participation and engagement. More holistic fitness challenges – those that include steps and time-based activities – allow your team to celebrate every little win: from daily stepping goals to group fitness activities like yoga or (water) aerobics.

How to increase inclusion

When you go the holistic route to include as many of your team members as possible, there are many opportunities within our app . Inclusive challenges can take advantage of customizable leaderboards to encourage participants rather than deter them.

If you’d like to showcase the top scorers without alienating other members, you can choose to make only the top 10, 50, etc. visible to all participants. This provides a level of privacy for the larger group but allows the visible top scorers to act as a motivating force for all participants.

If you’re more interested in consistency, you could make a daily target leaderboard available. It can be incredibly encouraging for challenge participants to accomplish a daily fitness goal and help them be more consistent with movement throughout the week. Should you have no interest in leaderboards at all, it’s possible to make leaderboards private so that participants are only able to see their own activity. Hiding leaderboards is a great way to motivate participants to focus on their own fitness goals without being bogged down by what others are doing or the pressure to prove themselves to others. .

Collective Goals

When embarking on a fitness challenge within an organization, it can be beneficial to think about collective goals. When you think of the overall aim of the challenge, you can focus more on fostering a culture of well-being and camaraderie among participants. When participants collectively aspire to cultivate healthy lifestyle habits towards a greater purpose, not only can you achieve greater things, but the challenge can serve as a catalyst for team building. Striving for a collective step, time, or distance goal is a great way strengthen team dynamics, boost morale, and create a positive and energetic workplace environment.

Bottom Line

At the end of the day, how you determine success will be the core determinant for what kind of challenge you choose. For high stakes competition, your success is dependent on a few top scorers. For a more inclusive, friendly competition, it’s what you’re able to accomplish as an organization that matters – with every small action counting towards the collective goal.

At CorporateFitness.app, we believe that movement is for everyone. We encourage you to choose your goals according to your organization’s unique determinants of success.