You should organize corporate hostile take-overs. But use the old school version where you take the businesses by force. Train your colleagues to be warriors with swords. Make them wear chainmail and armor. They have to carry a shield at all times. Then go find your biggest competitor and annex the whole building. It'll be fun. Imagine all of the extra strength, stamina, and team building opportunities.

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Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

My workplace challenges are based on site, so a marathon or mudrun are off the table. Our multiple sites host 5 k's and those are a blast - my PR actually came from that. I don't think we do cycling challenges but with a pretty good cycling studio they could.

My gripe with all the step count, etc initiatives is the requirement to either double log activities (daily) or use their (stupid) phone ap. Their systems never work in a seamless fashion with my garmin devices or garmin connect. So despite loads of training for triathlon I don't bother to take part. Maybe if I could sit down once a week to populate time/distance, maybe I could be bothered to do that. However the systems seem to be set to prevent back entry of workouts.

Therefore my recommendation is to use a recording system capable of seamless incorporation of data from other than fitbit devices.

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To breathe, to feel, to know I'm alive.

Our office works in tandem with a charity program in order to get guaranteed (and free) entry to a local race. They then host weekly runs. and the whole team fundraises together so that there is never a problem meeting the minimum amount.

If you are in a major city, see if there is a JP Morgan Corporate Challenge in your area. We are in NYC so we can usually get about 75-100 people from our (relatively small) office to participate.

In general I would stick with running events as not everyone will have a bike or feel comfortable enough on a bike to ride with a group.


I would also agree that distance/step challenges are annoying since they rarely integrate well with strava/garmin/etc. But the rest of the office seems to enjoy doing them.

Do you have a gym on site? Does it have showers? I think these are a must to encourage exercising before/during or after work. We've installed a very basic gym in the office with showers and run bootcamps two evenings a week at 5:15pm and one Friday mornings at 7am. We have about 5-6 guys in there at lunch lifting weights/spinning/rowing and about 10-15 people at the bootcamp classes. The company is only about 100 strong so I see this as a decent turnout.

Outside of this we've a Sport committee that encourages participation at local 5km/10km runs and provides free company logo/team t-shirts, plus another group of 4-5 guys that do trail runs as part of a local series and are super enthusiastic, encouraging people to join.

I think from a work perspective, it's hard to organize the masses outside of the working environment unless you and your families are close friends and hang out together on the weekends anyway. Keeping the activities close to the place of work is a big plus.

If you build it they will come...

We have Sprout at our company. It is lifestyle based so it actually awards point for things - everything from actual exercise to house cleaning (I am not kidding) and eating carrots! A lot of blow back from people who are active already as you can imagine however these people generally are not the ones that need to be motivated.

We seem to get better success when we are activity based - staying very basic - did you move or not? I think this removes some intimidation. A 10k run for me may actually be easier than a 3k walk for someone who never does anything. Remember that this is the person you are trying t motivate. Try to be creative: currently we are running a Olympic/ Paralympic contest. We create teams - you get a point for each activity no matter what and your team gets bonus points for correctly picking the Country of the medal winners in Olympic Events. We have prizes etc. some are for winning and some are just the goofy fun stuff.

Again, remember who you are trying to motivate and if you just get them moving that may be a win. Never in my life, aside from serious injury, have I not been able to just go run 10k if I felt like doing so - I am not the person you need motivate. You need to use people who are active to positively encourage others and make it fun so they stick with it.

Good luck.