If you’re looking to create a positive company culture, you might propose an employee wellness idea to jump start the well-being of every employee at your company. Whether you encourage physical activity, improved job satisfaction, eating a healthy meal, mental health activities, or any other workplace wellness challenges, you’ll be on the right track to encourage employees to invest in themselves as much as they invest in your company. You don’t need to create an employee wellness program or create a wellness committee to come up with ideas for a workplace wellness challenge, we’ve narrowed down a few popular choices you can implement in your workplace with ease. So, let’s dive in.
Declutter The Mind is a meditation app for your workplace to help make your team happier and culture healthier. In an average 9-to-5 work day, just 5 minutes of mindfulness meditation can release stress, improve focus, and boost creativity. For your company, a more mindful team means better workplace culture and teamwork.
1. Fitness challenges
Fitness challenges are a great workplace wellness challenge. However, you’ll want to be mindful of employees with physical disabilities and find ways to include them in the challenge. A few fitness challenges you can try for your wellness programs are: 10,000 steps, weightlifting, 2L of water daily, or a daily workout of your choice. You might also start encouraging employees to move around the office or take the stairs when possible.
For those with sedentary jobs, especially in an office or remote environment, you can set easy fitness tasks for people to do. For example, you might recommend an hour of exercise per day as one of the challenge ideas. That way, anyone can choose the fitness task they want to do for their hour workout. Plus, it promotes healthy living and can boost their physical and mental health.
2. Daily Meditation
If you notice that toxicity is on the rise in your company’s culture, creating a daily meditation wellness challenge can be beneficial for employees. You can sign up for Declutter The Mind at Work to give employees access to a meditation app, where they’ll be able to track the time they spend meditating. For a mental health month or to start off the new year on the right track, you might recommend meditation wellness challenge ideas.
Employees can choose whether to meditate for five minutes up to 60 minutes, depending on how much time they need to calm the mind. It’ll help boost employee morale by making people more mindful in their every day interactions. Plus, there’s no better mental wellness idea than working towards becoming more present and watching your negative thoughts disappear.
3. Save Some Of Your Earnings
One aspect of well-being often overlooked involves employee financial wellness. Surprisingly, a study showed that 56 % of Americans have less than $1000 saved up; this indicates that many people are living pay-check to pay-check. Therefore, you can help boost employee financial wellness by helping them save 10-20% of their check or price-matching their savings up to a set amount.
You might offer a specialized savings account or a company shareholder program that allows employees to set aside some of their earnings into a special account that the company monitors until the employee needs it at a later date. You might recommend ideas on how employees can save for a down payment on a mortgage, wedding, retirement, growing family, or a rainy day.
4. Sleep Challenge Ideas
While you’d hope that your employees are getting eight hours of sleep each night, some may be sleeping less, which can also hurt your company productivity. You might create an employee wellness program or wellness challenge that encourages employees to go to bed early each night and try to wake up naturally.
Employees with children may find this challenge difficult, so you might create other options for people who have responsibilities, which impede their ability to sleep through the night. Getting a good night’s rest is key for employee health, it can also reduce health risks while improving overall mood.
6. Eating Healthy
A healthy eating challenge will look different for every body. After all, everyone has different dietary restrictions. However, a healthy eating challenge might recommend a daily calorie limit, a reduction in fast food take out, an additional daily serving of vegetables, or your eight glasses of water per day. Be mindful of all the dietary restrictions, or have accommodations for different diets to be more inclusive.
The goal is to encourage healthy employees to prioritize their diet through mindful eating. Some people are intolerant to vegetables while others need more healthy fat than carbs, so you don’t want to dictate too many of the finer details so that your team enjoys this wellness program. You might also include eating healthy as one of many wellness challenge ideas that are bundled together to improve overall health.
7. Reading challenge ideas
A light-hearted workplace wellness program could include a reading challenge. Some companies might allow employees to expense books for furthering their education in their craft. Some offices even have mini libraries where employees can keep books on shelves to further their reading.
Setting a workplace wellness challenge for employees to read as many books as they can in a single calendar year can help you level up your team by focusing on their education. After all, who doesn’t want intelligent business decisions being made? You can encourage employees to read in the evening before bed or during a 30-minute reading break every Friday to help level up their knowledge.
8. Positivity challenge
One of the most important benefits of workplace wellness challenges is improving our attitudes at work. If you’re looking for simple wellness challenge ideas, consider a positivity challenge. You might encourage leaders at your company to focus more on praise than criticism during the workday.
Often, those who struggle with mental health are more likely to hear criticism for their attitude. However, by encouraging employees to be more positive during their workdays, it’ll help boost everyone’s mental health and wellbeing at the company. And that’s exactly what the workplace wellness challenge is for.
9. Sustainability Challenges
If you’re looking for wellness challenge ideas that leave the world better than you left it, consider doing sustainability challenge in your workplace. Companies that reduce air pollution, carbon emissions, and pollution in our oceans and on land, help improve employee wellness on a grander scale.
Plus, an employee wellness program should also consider environmental factors. Employees should be able to give feedback to their workplaces to ensure that companies hold themselves to higher standards for environmental factors and sustainability.
10. Charity Challenges
A simple workplace wellness challenge you can encourage employees to do is donate to a charity of their choice with employer matching. Alternatively, you can also offer volunteer days to every employee’s favorite charity. Wellness challenges that encourage employees to give back to their community help boost employee morale.
Doing good deeds or acts of kindness plays a positive role in employee wellness. Incorporating charity activities in workplace wellness challenges can help challenge employees to help others, reward employees, and allow them to see the wellness benefits that come from doing good.
Conclusion
A workplace wellness challenge can be a transformative experience for employees and employers. Whether you encourage mental wellness, employee health through healthy meals, or working towards better physical health, there are many ways for employees to live a healthy lifestyle. Helping employees adopt healthy habits will provide health benefits that allow all the employees to benefit from many positive changes. A good wellness program can be a game-changer for your business, you can combine some or all of the ideas on this list to create a corporate wellness program for everybody.
