Work is jammed with stressful variables. Workload, expectations, colleagues, work-life balance, and more are common contributors to workplace stress. These are just a few examples of why workplace wellness is so valuable.
It’s estimated that 84% of workers cite excessive workload as a key contributor to stress. Maintaining a wellness program can be incredibly difficult, especially when your employees are working remotely. We know it can be difficult to find fresh and fun ideas to have your remote employees involved in work culture. Thats exactly why our workplace wellness ideas are easy to implement and will have a lasting positive impact on your employees.
Summer’s coming around, and that means it’s a perfect time to start focusing on remote employee wellness. We’ve compiled a list of workplace wellness challenges that you can introduce to your remote workers.
Top 10 Workplace Wellness Ideas
1. Daily Fitness Challenge
One of the most straightforward ways to run a wellness challenge is by encouraging your staff to complete one fitness activity per day. The idea is to increase repetitions over the course of a month as the challenge moves on.
You can reward the person with the most improvement and consistency with something exciting. You might even offer a couple of vacation days to the person who works the hardest on their fitness.
It’s difficult to standardize the results considering that everyone on the staff starts at different levels. That’s why it’s important to reward improvement rather than the final result.
Take a look at our Break a Sweat Boot Camp class for some excellent ideas on how to get people excited about getting fit.
2. Mindfulness Walking Challenge
Another excellent practice to encourage is walking meditation.
When we think of meditation, we typically conjure up an image of someone sitting down. That said, walking meditation is an excellent option that promotes mental and physical health.
The idea is to walk slowly, monitoring your breath and keeping your breath in sync with your footsteps. You can create a challenge that asks remote workers to delve into walking meditation once per day. You should also create a forum for your staff to talk about the benefits they experience.
We offer a Mindfulness for Boosting Focus class at Twello that could be a great supplement to your walking meditation challenge.
3. 8 Hours of Sleep Challenge
Remote work is certainly affecting the sleep habits of a lot of people. Lack of physical exertion is one area that reduces the inherent desire to sleep. Further, a serious shift in someone’s routine is enough to throw sleeping habits off balance.
It’s often necessary to make an intentional shift in one’s life to improve or realign sleep habits. Fortunately, these changes can be monitored by sleep apps on our phones.
Ask your staff to try and make lifestyle adjustments that lead to benefits in sleep. You can create a challenge that asks staff to compete for the most nights of 8 hours of sleep during a period of time. Mindfulness is another practice that can benefit sleep, and your staff might benefit from our Mindfulness for Improving Sleep course.
4. Mindfulness Challenge
Mindfulness practice has been shown to have legitimate benefits for individuals. It’s the process of learning to be aware of what’s happening in your mind and body on a moment-to-moment basis. Simply put, mindfulness is the art of becoming “present.”
In order to cultivate mindfulness, a person needs to practice it. So, a great challenge for your staff is to practice mindfulness for 5 to 10 minutes per day. You can then ask them to continue the practice for 5 days straight.
It’s tough to judge who’s being the “most mindful” or say who’s doing the “best job” when it comes to mindfulness, though. Simply offer a small reward to anyone who completes the practice, although they might find the practice to be rewarding enough by itself.
At Twello, we offer a Mindfulness 101 course that informs participants of all of the fundamentals of cultivating a practice.
5. Meditation Challenge
Meditation, much like mindfulness, is a practice of becoming more aware of aspects of yourself. In meditation, though, the practitioner typically focuses on their breath in an effort to become more conscious of the thoughts and feelings that pass through their minds.
It’s something that seems simple enough, but it becomes very difficult in practice. Over time, though, practitioners find that meditation calms feelings of anxiety and produces feelings of clarity.
Decades of research back those feelings up as well.
Twello offers a Meditation 101 course that could give your staff the building blocks for beneficial practice
6. Journaling Challenge
Another way of processing thoughts and feelings is the process of journaling. Journaling has been proven to reduce stress and anxiety.
Journaling is a mature practice of thinking and processing the things that happen to us during life. It’s often the case that serious events in life go unreflected upon and don’t teach us lasting lessons.
Journaling is a healthy way of rotating and directing your experiences to allow them to benefit you. Challenge your staff to journal each day for a month and assess their progress at the end of each week. We offer a Science of Gratitude Journaling class that could provide some avenues toward journaling success.
7. Water Drinking Challenge
Drinking enough water is tantamount to physical and mental health. In the face of so many other options, though, it’s difficult for many people to keep up with the suggested minimum of water per day.
If you’re a generally healthy person, four-to-six cups of water per day applies, according to Harvard Health. Those who have various conditions or take different medications, though, might need more.
Our Mindfulness and The Body class can help individuals learn how to assess their bodies’ approach to dietary needs with a healthier view. You might challenge your staff to drink the appropriate amount of water and monitor how they feel as they go through the process.
A great way to incentivize hydration is to offer water bottles to your staff. Many of us fail to get hydrated because we don’t have constant access to water.
When water is constantly accessible, though, you’re much more likely to drink as much as you need.
8. Daily Stretching Challenge
The sedentary life that comes with working in a chair (at home or in the office) can lead to a lot of muscular pain. Stretching is a great way to ease into physical challenges for employees.
Practices like yoga and general stretching are excellent physical challenges for employees. Most yoga activities accelerate the heart rate while stretching a vast array of muscle groups.
You can challenge your staff to complete a yoga program. These programs can range from a few days to a few months. You can also take a look at our Mat Yoga and Chair Yoga classes to see if it’s something that might work well for your staff.
9. Self-Care Challenge
Self-care is a term that gets thrown around a lot in self-help conversations. It seems like a vague term, but it’s actually very simple.
Self-care is the practice of giving your body and mind what they need. Exercise, personal hygiene, rest, and attendance to psychological issues are all parts of this process.
A great way to challenge your staff is for them to create self-care goals for the following month and offer a way for them to track their success. Mindfulness helps a lot with knowing what your body and mind need.
Our Mindfulness for Work-Life Balance course is a great place to find more insight into these practices.
10. Nutrition Challenge
If there’s anything that provides a direct correlation to mental and physical health, it’s nutrition. All of the practices above are important, but nutrition and hydration are the only two that are paramount to your survival.
You might challenge your staff to cook each of their meals for the following week. It’s important to talk with your employees about what they’re comfortable doing, though, because dietary needs vary for each individual.
A nutrition challenge could mean cooking a meal or two per week, or it could mean becoming more mindful of what one eats.
The practice of mindful eating gives people a deeper awareness of flavor, food source, and the speed of eating.
Twello offers a Mindful Eating and Nutrition Class that can help a great deal with mindful eating.
Build Your Workplace Wellness Program With Us
Hopefully, our look at ideas for wellness challenges for remote employees was useful to you. The possibilities are endless when it comes to workplace wellness challenges!
Use this opportunity to encourage wellness in the workplace for summer through summer team challenges. We’re here to help!
Explore our site for more ideas on corporate wellness, insights into wellness challenge options, corporate summer challenges, and a whole lot more.
Are you ready to begin putting solutions in place? Your company’s path to wellness shouldn’t be stressful. Contact Twello today to schedule a free consultation.
