A successful health and wellness program must include components that support all the dimensions of health and wellness if it’s to create sustainable, healthy habits that ultimately help employees in the company maximize their quality of life and improve their workplace productivity.
01
OBTAIN EXECUTIVE-LEVEL BUY-IN
02
FORM YOUR HEALTH AND WELLNESS TEAM
03
DEFINE THE MISSION AND SET MEASURABLE GOALS
04
DEVELOP ENGAGING PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES
A “Know Your Numbers” session to kick off the competition is a great way to stimulate interest and give the Health and Wellness team the baseline data they need to reward both overall improvement and participation.
During the competition, the health and wellness team can introduce new challenges and reward participants for addressing other areas of wellness, like meditating daily, disconnecting from devices and screens, or spending time outdoors. An added bonus is that the categories and format lend themselves to other spinoff competitions that can be self-organized, such as a daily step-tracking group or a healthy recipe exchange.
Know Your Numbers Competition

The four categories can be loosely defined as Drink, Eat, Move, and Sleep.
Introducing additional challenges and ad hoc prizes like company swag also helps generate interest and build momentum, although prizes are just one form of incentive. When brainstorming incentives, it’s important to align them to company values and competition goals in order to encourage the highest level of participation. For example, in a community-centric organization, you might consider a financial donation to a nonprofit of the winner’s choice. A competitive organization can set up cross-company or intracompany competitions.
Or, if the budget permits, financial incentives such as monthly gym membership offsets or company subsidies for in-home fitness equipment work well to motivate people to participate in specific tasks. Consider rewarding winners with reoccurring local fresh produce delivery or a paid subscription to a meditation app like Headspace. That said, if budgets are limited, genuine praise and recognition from peers and leadership is incentive enough.
Finally, all successful programs that drive engagement need to have leadership support and an occasional refresh. Programs that get overhauled regularly with new added components keep employees excited, energized, active, and engaged. Health and wellness leadership teams should also be refreshed, similar to how board positions rotate every two years, to empower others and inject new ideas.
