Corporate fitness challenge that gets all co-workers active

The challenge is about encouraging your co-workers to become active, competitive, and healthy.

Inner Sense Challenge - an activities/fitness challenge where co-workers earn points from any form of activity during an 8 week period and compete in teams.

By allowing all physical activities to count in the challenge, even those employees that do not go to a gym every week or ride their bike to work every day are becoming involved, and their competitive spirit is developed.

Here’s why it is so popular:

Everyone can participate
Gets those people moving - that today are not into fitness/not have an active lifestyle
1 minute = 1 point, for anything active - really easy to understand
Each company gets their own private challenge, with their chosen set of activities, rules and teams

How does it work?

All forms of activity give points
Simple – 1 minute = 1 point
You can form any set of activities you like for your own challenge. Example: Add Coffee free day, Attending healthy foods breakfast seminar, bicycling to work etc
The usual race period is 8 weeks - you compete in teams / departments / locations / other
It’s a points race where everyone can participate and collect points – for being active/healthy
Focus on that it should be fun and inspiring - those who would otherwise not exercise will find it's fun
Based on an IT system and managed via web, mobile phone, email, posters in the workplace, smartphones, touchscreens – all user friendly

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Who is using it?

The service is based on an internationally established platform with many customers with 20-8000 participants in the challenges.

This service has been around since 2005, based in Sweden, with many well known customers such as IKEA, Atlas Copco, Heidelberg Cement, WSP Group and Tieto.

Why is this challenge the best choice for corporate wellness?

Inner Sense Challenge is all about being active and having fun - in any activity form you like.
It's easy: 1 minute = 1 point, and you do not need any technology/gadgets etc that need technical support, distribution etc
We are very focused on team challenges - so that as many as possible can participate and find activities that are attractive to them.
Elite workout employees will not ruin the challenge, the nature of the rules engine makes it encouraging for everyone/most employees.
Good support for challenges across/between departments, offices, groups etc - even for bigger organisations
Cost effective – no need to buy pedometers, no distribution costs, and even an attractive challenge fee

What do other companies trying out the challenge say?

Two IKEA companies challenged each other in a fitness challenge. They created teams in part by random (mixing people from the business in a new way) and partly based on their departments and groups (to encourage the groups/departments to challenge each other). All teams contribute to their company’s average score.

With the challenge system multi-lingual they could invite co-workers from different cultures on the same premises. The weekly letters from the Challenge were written in several different languages.

The wellness group at IKEA concluded: We created a challenge with many specifics but the customer service has worked well – and our participants have appreciated the simple web solution.

IT company Tieto has more than 3000 co-workers in Sweden. Their fitness program Go Tieto has made the majority of them voluntarily compete in a challenge against each other. Go Tieto is a corporate customized version of the Challenge service. Tieto does some of the administration on their own which partly reduces the cost but also makes it possible to combine internal wellness and fitness initiatives with the ongoing challenges. Go Tieto is conducted in several periods throughout the year – each time with a new focus: get started, stamina, etc.

The participants are inspired by joining a raffle for gifts but primarily by the positive social pressure to participate and contribute.

Anne-Li Wretling, HR specialist at Tieto, says: It is a major challenge to reach all persons in a large organisation, but by using Go Tieto challenge we’ve managed to have a surprisingly large number of co-workers thrilled by the events and the challenge itself.

How do I get my co-workers to compete?

Challenge them! Will you beat my team? Everyone can join – and there are activities for everyone to gain points.

Be sure to have a good time, it should be fun to be active.

Even joint activities and events gives points in the race.

Encourage your employees to participate by awarding medals with bonus points.

Does your company already have a gym agreement with a partner or similar? Give points and bonus points for those participants that use them.

Popular challenge forms

Challenge:	Standard For everyone	Standard Effort challenge	Premium
Objective	Involve as many co-workers as possible to try out health and fitness	Challenge co-workers to really improve their health	A truly fair challenge for everyone regardless of current fitness level
Rules for points	As simple as possible 1 minute = 1 point	Gain more points for more effort in your activity	Free to choose *
Bonus medals	Selected medals that inspire everyone to get started	Selected medals that inspire physical activity, effort and improving health	Free choice and formation of bonus medals *
Forms of activity	All physical activity including walking, gardening etc	Standard points for physical exercise. Walking etc gains lower points	Free choice and weighting of all forms of physical activity
Count minutes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Count steps	(optional)	(optional)	Yes
Web, mobile, billboard	Yes	Yes	Yes
Custom top lists: bicycling, old boys, sales top 10 etc		Yes	Yes
Team leader features		Yes	Yes
Activity monitors – measures fair points for effort and time			Yes
Info displays & tablets			Yes **
Computations for drawing winners and awards			Yes
Statistics package			Yes

How to get started?

A typical startup to make your administration simple is:

Have a meeting with us on your objectives and how you would want to customize your challenge (we have a checklist)
All co-workers/employees are registered (send us an Excel sheet)
You will get a poster from us. Distribute it to all offices and groups – ”now we are going to have this challenge – it will be fun! Management is participating – can you beat them? Will your team beat the other departments?”
All participants get an introduction and then a login e-mail from us
The challenge begins
Every week, we will send a cheering e-mail to all participants – with a positive text and the current score list
Non-active participants may be hidden after 2-3 weeks
No need for people to apply/opt-in/opt-out
Your cost is of course based on active participants only

Apply your interest now!