Having an engaged workforce is essential for companies. One unique way to do that is to challenge your team with fun monthly or quarterly team-building experiences. So how do you come up with fun employee challenge ideas for your organization? Simple, you turn to a list like this one that does the hard work for you.
Keep reading for 15 employee challenge ideas your team can use.
1. Employee Care Packages
One of the first workforce challenge ideas we suggest is sending out employee care packages. Care packages are fun, especially if you have a remote team.
Instead of sending a package for your team, give each team member a budget ($50-$100), a box, and a shipping label. Encourage your employees to send a package to another team member with whom they may not have spent a ton of time. Encourage them to fill the box with fun, local items and ship it to their person.
As boxes arrive, encourage your team to share the boxes in your company’s community (you can use Workrowd for this) and post it on social media. It’s a win for your organization and your employees who get to try new products!
2. Send a Thank You Note
Does the thought of care packages seem a bit spendy to you? You can create a budget-friendly experience for your team by encouraging your employees to send thank you notes to 3-5 employees who have touched their lives. Make this experience unique by creating company-branded thank you notes for your team to use.
3. Drink Water
Water is an essential part of life, but most people need to drink more plain water (even if they get enough water in their diets through other means.) Therefore, encouraging employees to consume the necessary amount of water is a great habit to support.
Try hosting a water challenge to get people to drink the recommended amount of water every day for a month or two. You can even send a branded bottle to help your employees complete this task.
4. Screen Time
As employees continue to work from home, screen time has become a concern.
Whether you use an Android or Apple device, you can track screen time to see where you can cut back.
For this employee challenge idea, get your staff to check out how much time they spend on their phones and help them develop a plan to cut it down. Employees who can reduce screen time by 1-2 hours can expect a fun prize.
5. Book/Movie Club
Reading a book or watching a movie together can create some great experiences with your team. Employee challenge ideas don’t have to be complicated. Pick a shared watch or read and have a chat for 30 minutes to an hour one afternoon.
6. Learning a New Skill
Whether you are a seasoned employee or fresh out of college, learning new skills is essential. Encourage your employees to pick up a new hobby and use a site like Udemy or Skillshare to take a course.
Your organization can give out a small one-time bonus of $50 or so to go out and pick out an exciting class for employees to learn.
7. Get Outside
As temperatures start to cool down in most of the country, consider this employee challenge idea: help your team get outside.
Encourage team members to spend a relaxing evening outside reading a book or playing with their family.
It’s so easy to stay indoors whether you work from home or in an office. Encourage employees to break this cycle and spend time outdoors.
8. Journaling
Sharing your feelings with your colleagues can be challenging, but journaling can have an immensely positive benefit for your team.
Encourage your employees by purchasing nice, branded notebooks. Encourage employees to jot down their feelings, ideas, and wishes in the journals you provide.
You can give a fun prize to the employee who writes the most daily entries in a specific time frame. Just encourage employees to blur out their entries if they contain private information.
9. Walking/Working Out
Employee challenge ideas aren’t easy to come up with. One of the most basic ideas is a walking or working out challenge for your team. Encourage your employees to take a noon walk or work out before work. You could even compile some of your favorite free workout videos on YouTube or get a gym membership for employees for the month to encourage employees to complete this challenge.
10. Family/Friend Time
Workplace challenges don’t have to be complicated. For example, one unique challenge your team can take on is to encourage your employees to spend more time with friends and family throughout the week.
Whether you are eating dinner with your family or watching a movie, time spent with your loved ones and away from work is essential.
Get employees to spend more time with their families for a month. You’ll quickly notice a workplace morale bump.
11. Volunteering
Volunteering at work can have several surprising benefits. Unfortunately, most organizations aren’t taking advantage of the power of volunteer days at work.
Try lining up a few volunteer efforts during one month out of the year. Encourage employees to participate in as many events as they’d like to. Then, after the event is over, encourage employees to share their experiences with the company (or even on social media.)
Before you know it, more employees will be volunteering and enjoying the benefits of volunteer work at your company.
12. Mindfulness/ Meditation
Mindfulness at work can have many positive side effects. Being tense or moody is no way to show up to the office, but some people do so anyway. Teaching employees proper coping techniques can have a net positive effect on your organization.
Establishing a mindfulness practice is easier said than done. It takes time to understand why you are feeling the way you are and take action on it. As an organization leader, you can help employees get in touch with their emotions by leading mindfulness sessions.
13. Habit Building
As we just discussed, it can take a while to build healthy, positive habits. Most employees don’t have the energy to find a routine and stick to it. What if they had an incentive to do so?
Sit down with your employees and create a habit-building challenge. Each employee can come up with the habit they want to build. You can walk them through defining the practice and what activity they want to do daily. From there, you create a longer challenge (at least 60 days because forming a habit can take a while).
14. Networking
Networking is a fundamental part of business success, but most employees don’t network enough after getting a full-time job. On the other hand, networking can be positive for your business and your employee’s future career.
If you want employees to start networking more, make a challenge out of it. Encourage employees to take to LinkedIn or their favorite Slack group to find interesting people in their niche. Requesting a networking call is as simple as sending an inquiry. The only negative outcome would be a ‘no’ from that person.
15. Healthy Sleep
Last but not least, many Americans aren’t getting enough sleep. So one of the best things you can do to encourage better sleep is to make it a challenge.
Encourage employees to track their sleeping habits with their devices or enter the time they are getting. Employees who clock the most nighttime sleep hours can win a fun prize like a new pillow.
Conclusion: Employee Challenge Ideas Your Team Will Love
Are you ready to connect with your team through fun employee challenge ideas? We hope that this article gave you something interesting to think about when planning out your next company challenges.
Workrowd can be a great place to host your workplace challenges. Shoot us an email at hello@workrowd.com to see if we are suitable for your organization.
