Beyond 10,000 Steps a Day: Company Step Challenge Ideas

Let's face it: a goal of 10,000 steps a day might not be the best fit for your employees. Boost your challenge engagement by thinking outside of the 10k steps per day box.

Hosting a corporate step challenge that will engage your entire organization can be hard. That's why we created MoveSpring, a wellness platform that makes fitness fun for everyone. At MoveSpring, we offer a variety of challenge types that allow your employees to compete on more than just steps. We also focus on content, community and gamification to keep it fun for participants of all fitness levels. Break out of your corporate fitness rut with these pro tips on how to create an engaging step challenge at your company.

Tip #1: Set a realistic, but challenging goal that varies with each challenge

Increasing engagement in your step challenges begins with setting a solid challenge goal. Although aiming for 10,000 steps a day can be great, this goal may be too difficult to achieve for some. And for others, that goal isn’t challenging enough! Your employees may also want to work towards an active minute or distance goal for added variety. We suggest mixing things up a bit to encourage users of different activity levels and exercise styles to participate.

You can also use personalized goals to allow employees to chose the goal that works best for them, whether that’s 2,000 or 15,000 steps a day.

Tip #2: Mix Up Your Challenge Mode

To get beyond the typical 10,000 steps a day goal, why not mix up your challenge mode? When you create your MoveSpring challenge, choose a mode that encourages teamwork or long-term, healthy habits instead of the same individual daily steps goal.

Challenges To Encourage Teamwork

Group Target

Use our Group Target mode to challenge your entire organization to meet a step, distance, or active minutes goal over the course of your challenge! Group Target combines the activity data from all participants into one group score. This mode encourages participation from all of your users without requiring that each user try to meet a certain number of steps in a day.

For example, for a group of around 100 users, try setting a Group Target goal of 20 million steps over the course of one month. This would average out to around 7,000 steps per user per day. Active users can contribute as many steps as possible, while less active users can still feel like they are contributing to the larger goal.

Group Target Fundraiser

As an added bonus, your users can get moving together for a good cause with Group Target Fundraiser! This mode is similar to our Group Target mode but with a fun twist! Start by setting a step, distance, or active minutes goal for your group to reach. If that goal is met, your users unlock a donation (handled by your organization) towards a good cause. A win-win for everyone!

Group Virtual Race

Our Group Virtual Race mode is all about going the distance as a team. Your users will move as a group through a fun, illustrated map based on their combined distance totals. As they progress through the map, they can unlock milestones and new scenes together. This mode is another great way to encourage teamwork and deemphasize individual step goals.

Challenges to Form Healthy Habits

Stick To It

Use our Stick To It mode to help your users ease into a healthy habit. Just set a daily step, distance, or active minutes goal, then determine how many times you want your users to meet that goal. As a starting point, your organization could challenge users to get 8,000 steps at least 20 times over the entire month of August.

For every day you meet the goal, you’ll earn a fun sticker recognizing your achievement to encourage you to keep up the good work! If users miss a day or two, that's a-okay thanks to the forgiveness that our Stick To It mode provides.

Target

With Target, you can set a total step, distance, or active minutes goal for participants to reach before the end of your challenge. This mode allows users to set their own pace rather than requiring a specific number of steps, distance, or active minutes each day. Daily totals aren't as important in this mode because users just need to meet their Target goal by the end of the challenge. This is another great way to encourage users to focus on long-term health improvements as they work on reaching their goal.

Custom Activities

Custom activity challenges allow you to step outside the box and go beyond physical activity challenges. You can run a corporate challenge based on any activity you can imagine, from meditation to reading. Custom activity challenges are a great way to engage participants in your organization and create new healthy habits together.

Tip #3: Mix Up Your Metric

Get beyond the standard 10,000 steps a day by switching up your challenge metric! With MoveSpring challenges, you can set goals based on steps, distance, or active minutes for added variety.

CHALLENGE USERS TO EARN ACTIVE MINUTES

With the exception of our Virtual Race modes, all of our challenges modes can be based on active minutes instead of steps! Basing a challenge on active minutes instead of steps allows your users to incorporate a variety of exercises into their daily routine. Some users may prefer higher intensity walks to get their active minutes, while other users may chose to swim, do yoga, or row. By basing your challenge on active minutes, all of these activities can count towards the challenge goal.

Challenge Users to Go the Distance

All challenge modes in MoveSpring allow you to set scoring up based on distance. Setting a distance-based goal can help users visualize their achievements and feel a real sense of accomplishment after reaching a certain distance.

Our distance-only Virtual Race modes allow you to choose from fun and exciting themes. In our Journey through Space theme, your users can virtually travel from Earth to deep space. After reaching a new location along the virtual race path, your users will unlock fun educational content tied to that milestone. Once a user makes it to the International Space Station in our Journey through Space theme, they’ll learn the best space-approved snack: Peanut butter! Learn more about our Virtual Race themes here.

Tip #4: Think Outside the Box With Content

Promote healthy lifestyle changes through our content feature in MoveSpring! Our content feature provides endless opportunities to promote wellness for your group beyond a 10,000 steps-per-day goal. Choose from hundreds of resources in our curated content library on topics like fitness, nutrition, and health, or share your own content!

Inspire your users by sharing easy nutrition tips, fun recipes, or a meditation guide! You can also encourage users to comment on shared content for additional engagement. Users can share their favorite ways to incorporate healthy choices into their busy lives or comment if they tried a new recipe.

With actionable content, you can take content a step further by asking your employees to complete various prompts throughout your challenge. For example, ask employees to catch up with a loved one or skip a sugary drink. Once they’ve completed the prompt, they can mark it complete in the app to get credit for the action.

No time to build out your own content strategy? No worries! Check out our content collections from the content library, which include anywhere from 5-20 themed content posts. Collections are ready to be shared as-is, but can also be fully customized to fit your specific needs.

Tip #5: Use Our Activity Converter

Our last tip is to enable our in-app activity converter so your employees can convert activities like swimming, cycling, and yoga into steps. This option gives users the ability to count their favorite activities towards your step challenges, even if they aren’t physically earning steps for their activities. Learn more about enabling the activity converter here. You can also check out this guide to learn more about converting activities to steps on MoveSpring.

Engage Your Employees with MoveSpring

Promoting wellness as a lifestyle choice through your next company step challenge can provide lasting benefits for your users. An engaging, inclusive MoveSpring challenge that goes far beyond 10,000 steps a day can start your users out on the right foot—literally!—on their journey to improved health.

Looking for more inspiration? Check out these tips to keep your company step challenge exciting.