The WellRight Blog

There’s just something about spring. Everything feels reborn as Mother Nature breaks through the detritus of winter and begins to bloom again.

Spring is full of possibilities, making it the perfect time to shake up your wellness program and offer fun, meaningful challenges to help employees break through their winter doldrums and reach for the sun.

Nature-inspired analogies aside, many employees are at least somewhat the worse for wear after the past couple of years, and they could use the opportunity to make a fresh, energizing start to the spring that lets them reconnect with others—and themselves.

It’s a new year! That means new beginnings and a fresh start for all of your employees.

While it may be easy to stay motivated shortly after the New Year, colder weather and shorter days can ultimately wane the best of wintertime intentions. For your employees struggling now that the holiday season is over, this is the perfect time to give them ideas for staying active and productive instead of hibernating on the couch.

Pumpkin spice, cool morning air, and falling leaves … as the season begins to change, fall can be a time to pause, reflect, and recharge. With the holiday season around the corner, fall is the perfect time to focus on well-being before the demands of family and work gatherings begin to take their toll.

As we enter our second autumn in this pandemic, implementing wellness challenges that prioritize self-care and nourish the spirit can help you and your employees take a much needed—and literal—breath of fresh air to recharge.

It’s that time of year again when the warm weather reminds us how great it is to be alive. But this isn’t just any summer. We’re rolling into this one with a newfound appreciation for little things we sometimes take for granted, like spending time with friends, going to our favorite restaurant, or hitting a workout class.

As we emerge into the summer sunshine, your employees may find themselves struggling to get back into healthy habits after a year of Zoom calls, Netflix, and food delivery. How can you help them recharge and reengage with your wellness program?

Hope is on the horizon. The spring of 2021 brings new promise—not only for the renewal of nature, but the possibility of life reaching some level of normalcy again.

This time of rebirth is a great time to get employees amped up for fun new wellness challenges. But with many employees still working at home, wellness challenge ideas for remote workers might be hard to find. You’ll need to be creative and find ways to connect people regardless of where they are.

Typically, people choose to participate in Dry January—a month without booze—after a holiday season of overconsumption. But this New Year, Dry January comes after not just a couple of months of above-average drinking, but nearly a full year.

The change of seasons may be a little bit harder to recognize this year. In many areas, the kids aren’t going back to school full-time. Traditional events like Halloween and Thanksgiving may look quite different. Football season is opening to empty stadiums.

Yet, fall is happening, nevertheless. The air will get crisp, the leaves will change, and the coffees and candles will be pumpkin spiced.

Summer is here! Although, if you hadn’t noticed the change of seasons, you’re hardly alone. Time has been difficult to track this year. With mandatory stay-at-home orders, school closings, and the cancellation of seasonal events, these past few months have felt unmoored from the calendar’s customary flow.

With all that’s going on in the world, it may be more difficult than ever to engage your employees in wellness challenges. But it’s worth persisting: Wellness challenges can help your employees take their minds off the troubling times we live in and recharge for whatever lies ahead. The key is to choose challenges that represent the six dimensions of wellbeing: emotional, financial, occupational, social, physical, and purpose.

Here are six of our favorite summer wellness challenges. Each of these activities can be done from home while social distancing.

Sometimes, wellness is easy.

When the weather is balmy and there’s a breeze in the air, it’s a joy to get outside and go for a walk or a bike ride, to have more walking meetings, and to find extra opportunities to get moving.

When the temperature falls to single digits, and the sidewalks are a mess of slush, snow, and ice? Getting outside gets a lot less appealing.

Fortunately, we have some great ways to keep employees moving throughout the winter months.

Tag! You’re it!

As a kid, those words were the signal to run like the wind, as your friends scattered across the playground, clambering up the monkey bars and dancing just out of your reach.

At no point during this activity did you stop and wonder how many calories you had burned.

Play can be transformative, making almost any activity more enjoyable and helping the time pass much more quickly. And if you want your corporate wellness program (and your wellness challenge ideas) to be more enjoyable for employees, why not incorporate a sense of play into it?