Our New Activity Based Wellness Challenge

Kip Shapiro coach of In the Zone -- our Week 1 Winning Team

​We recently kicked off a new activity based challenge similar to the Biggest Mover program we held a couple of years ago. We are using the Presidents Challenge site​ again to track our activities. We formed four teams and the teams compete each week based on their logged activity points. We just announced our first weekly winner -- In the Zone. At the same time the teams compete, we can all work individually toward our Presidents Challenge awards.

To enhance the fun factor, the Wellness Team created a Backfield in Motion football theme. Participants will be invited to play Frisbee football, attend a tailgate party and other things throughout the campaign. Members of winning teams receive small footballs to display on their badges. Kip is proudly displaying his in the photograph. This campaign will run through super bowl Sunday.

This challenge is unique in that you can really engage as part of a team or more quietly just record your activities and work toward your individual goals, so there is something for everyone.

Biggest Mover Finale

We held the closing celebration for our Biggest Mover program today. 58 of the 98 active participants earned a President's Challenge Award. We also had an additional ten people participate as friends and family and four of them earned awards.


Here is a video with some highlights of the program...

We ran the program from May 4 through August 31. People seemed to loose interest the last couple of weeks, so that might have been a tad long. However, the President's Challenge just changed the points needed to earn awards essentially doubling them. If you shortened the program now, people wouldn't have time to earn a variety of awards. 

We provided President's Challenge certificates to everyone who earned them. We also recognized the winning team, the top three point earners, and the individuals that improved the most in a fitness test that TrueFT ran for us at the beginning and end of the program. 


Overall the program was a lot of fun, inexpensive, and fairly easy to administer. Try it in your workplace. 

Tracking our Biggest Mover Team Progress

We just announced our first week's Biggest Mover Team winner. Congratulations to Team Anything Goes! The rankings were determined by the average points recorded per team member in the President's Challenge site, so teams were seriously disadvantaged if all their team members had not set up accounts and recorded their activities.

The HR team came up with a fun way to show the weekly team rankings. Nothing like a little craft project on a Friday afternoon.

Reaching Out to Families

I've been thinking about ways to involve the family members of our staff in our wellness program. I know that an individual's social network can have a profound impact on their health which is a point in a book I'm reading now, Connected. We dipped our toes in these waters when we conducted a smoking cessation program in 2007. We figured it would be extraordinarly difficult to quit smoking if you live with people that smoke, so we encouraged our staff to quit with their family members. Anecdotally, we know that some of our Biggest Loser program spilled over into the participants' families. Now I'm thinking about more formally involving families in our Biggest Mover campaign.

We're using the President's Challenge site to record activities. Participants will join the "ASHA Team" and a smaller workplace team modeled after our Biggest Loser team structure. I think I can also create an "ASHA Friends and Family Team" and encourage staff to involve their families. We have a rarely used ASHA Staff Facebook page, so I'm considering opening it up and using it to communicate health and wellness information. I plan to meet with our social media guru, Maggie McGary, tomorrow to talk about this.

Involving friends, family and community in workplace wellness was the topic of today's #co_health tweet chat. The participants generated enough ideas to lengthen my "to do" list considerably. You can use that link to review a recap and a transcript of the conversation when it's posted.

Please share your ideas for how we can involve the families of our staff in our wellness program.

From the Biggest Loser to the Biggest Mover

We are 10 weeks into our 12 week Biggest Loser Campaign and I’m starting to focus on what’s next. We are planning a four month healthy activities campaign (aka Biggest Mover) beginning May 1st. This campaign will focus on getting people to move more whether they are active already or sedentary. We’re thinking a lot about how we transition participants in the Biggest Loser into the Biggest Mover. The team component of our Biggest Loser campaign has worked very well, so we want to give people the option of keeping their Biggest Loser teams together. We’re also going to encourage people to form teams around a specific activity like swimming, biking, golf or dog walking. We just need to figure out how to let the team structure grow organically while still facilitating a process where everyone that wants to be is placed on a team.

We’d like to hold a few new trial exercise classes. (Does anyone know a good hip hop instructor?) We are also making plans with True AP to hold a Frisbee golf tournament. I would like to do something in conjunction with the community center to get our staff to visit there and see what they offer too.

Throughout the Biggest Loser Campaign participants have had to enter their weight anonymously on our intranet site. This has helped to keep folks accountable and allowed us to declare weekly winners. We want to do something similar for our Health Activity Campaign and the President’s Challenge might fit the bill. People can create an activity log and then accumulate points based on the energy expenditure for each activity. Participants can earn Presidential Champion Awards based on the number of points they achieve. We can order medallions, lapel pins and certificates to present to people. I’ve already set up a group and it looks like it will be pretty easy to pull participant reports. This should allow us to recognize both individual and team achievements.

I’ve been experimenting a bit with getupandmove.me. People here are such good sports. I sent out challenges to folks and without even questioning me they were doing wall sits, jumping jacks, rolling tennis balls under their feet, and standing on their heads. I thought team members might be able to use this to challenge each other to get up from their desks for a few minutes during the work day.

We’ve also talked about doing a field day like competition at the end of the campaign and posting a tip of the day to our intranet. Do you have any suggestions for us?