What's going on, everyone. I hope your day is off to a great start and welcome to the darn good leadership podcast. This show is all about being a strong and effective leader. One that can make positive impacts on your teams and communities. And the next 20 minutes, you're going to get ideas, inspiration and practical advice. You can take action on to be a darn good leader. I'm your host, Emily holding. And in today's show, we're doing a part two of episode four on being fit to lead. In part one, a fit to lead. I overviewed the importance of exercise and how it can help you build critical competencies that can make you a stronger leader. I also covered some ideas to bring movement into the workplace. And one of the ideas I spoke about was starting an internal movement challenge at your company. Well, I promised I would do a part two to further discuss this topic. As my place of work did a movement challenge over the month of September. Well, here we are in October. Happy October. And the good news is we had a very successful fund program that was well participated. And for this being our very first time out the gate, we wanted to keep it simple. The goals achievable, make it budget friendly and overall have lots of fun. So based off our learnings, I'm here today to give you 10 tips, to roll out a challenge at your own place of work. Now, when you hear the words, fitness challenge together, fitness challenge. What's coming to mind. You might start thinking about things like the show, the biggest loser or American ninja warrior, or perhaps even like the CrossFit documentaries that are on Netflix. An, oh my gosh, if you have not watched any of the CrossFit documentaries, they are addicting and absolutely wild. Wild the limits. These people push themselves to Matt Frazier and Tia. Claire. To me, they are beast. And I mean that in the best possible way. Oh my gosh. If you're looking for people who you want to look up to for discipline, motivation, resiliency, we'll look no further. But I digress. So, this is just something to be mindful of. Because we're most people here, fitness challenge, those two words together, their mind automatically goes to these crazy and intimidating things. And when people in a workplace here that, especially those who aren't avid people who like to work out, that's going to scare them off. They're going to hear that and be like, no, thank you. I pass. And so choosing words like movement, wellness, and ensuring your challenge is inviting to people wherever they are on their own scale of health, wellness, and fitness. That's what you want to do because we're not asking folks, you know, to drop a hundred pounds in a month or climb a rope and swing yourself over onto a moving target or lift a barbell over your head while you swim across the Atlantic. I mean, if you're into that, I mean, get it. I support you. But as a company challenged at no, no, no, no, no. We're going to tone it down. Bring it down. We want the average worker to feel welcomed, interested, curious, and most importantly, capable of partaking in this event. So if you're interested in learning more about how to roll out a movement challenge, that is easy budget, friendly, fun, and engaging. We'll look no further. I got ya. Here are 10 tips to roll out an internal movement challenge. Tip number one. Determine your why? Now, this is a tip for any event or thing you You need to determine and then communicate your why. Why are you doing this? Why does it matter? Why should people care? And for a movement challenge, it's no different. So, let me tell you about our, why for this move and challenge and why we did it at my place of work. The reason we started this challenge wasn't for weight loss or muscle gain. Of course health is important. Yes. But the crux of it for us was we wanted to create more engagement, connection and community across our workplace. All why building healthy habits. My company, we've been virtual first for some time and we're global and we've hired more and more amazing people into this virtual space. But I feel this. Shift happening. Where people now getting hired into the virtual space. Not because of their own fault, but they're just lacking organic connection and historical contexts. And that happens when you are in a co-located environment. So when you don't have that. It's just harder to foster. It's harder to get and don't get me wrong. There are tons of benefits of remote work, but the con here is that it is much harder for people to get to understand the company, to feel connection to their workplace. To get to know their coworkers. And so as leaders, we now have to make a very intentional efforts to create those opportunities for our people. Now I'm committed to this. I'm very pleased to say that my company's committed to this. Yay. This is what I'm passionate about. And it makes me so very excited to be able to offer something like this to my community. And that's really our Y. But if you're listening to this and you're like, Emily, Oh, Emily. Um, I'm not a virtual worker. I'm in the office every Dean day. And I see my dang coworkers faces every day. Well, what I would say to you is that's okay. Your wife are doing a movement or a wellness challenge can be different. And here's the thing. Exercise, regardless of if you're face to face or virtual. Exercise has massive benefits on your mental health. Your physical Your creativity, your productivity, your happiness, your engagement, your focus. The list goes Humans are meant to move. So if your job is primarily sitting in front of a screen all day, and then you get off work and you're looking at more screens all day, we'll finding ways to get your body in motion is important. Tip number two, identify a driver and a supporting cast. Running a movement challenge is going to be. An event. And if you've never led an event, a program, a project. Well, let me be the first to share that each of those is going to require someone who is intentionally driving that bus. You also cannot expect that that driver is going to do it all and have all the work. Done. No, they will need a strong supporting cast to help them with the prep and throughout the challenge. The driver for my company was not I was a strong supporting cast member and I was also an executive sponsor. And so was our head of people operations. And we had other members on my incredible team help out As well as our company's culture committee who gave really great feedback on our plans. But the driver was someone on my team and I told you about my team of rockstar. So one of my rock stars, her name is Ellen. And she is an amazing Ray of sunshine, as well as an incredibly organized and competent human being. Every company needs an Allen. And if you don't have an Ellen, will ours is taken. I'm sorry. But you do need someone to handle the details and have an eye for the end to end of the event. So figuring out who your drivers going to be and who your supporting cast is, is important. Tip number three. You can't please, everyone. Now I've mentioned this before that I'm from the Midwest. And I was raised to be somewhat of a people pleaser. But over the course of my career and dating my fiance, who's from Philly. My attempt to try to make everyone happy has been put in check. It's impossible. Whether we're talking about a family of four or a company of 400,000, it is not possible to please everyone. So just get it out of your head right now and go with what generally you think will work best. That's it use some common sense and go with This is important when you're figuring out your date, your duration, the details of the challenge. So the first big item is determining the date and duration. Finding a timeframe that's going to work perfectly for everyone in your company. That is a fool's errand. Stop it. Get that out of your head again instead. Use your time wisely and try to figure out if there's a week, a month, a time a year, just depending on the nature of your business that you need to avoid. And then look at the calendar and figure out a timeframe that generally works for most of the population. Once you got that timeframe in mind, then you're going to think about duration. And what I'll say here is don't struggle with this. In fact, my bold recommendation is go with a month, the month challenge for us. It was perfect when we do this again in the spring, which we're going to, we're going to run it for a month again. I feel like it was a long enough to build momentum and get that competition going. And it wasn't so long that it began to drag and people were like, um, when is this over? So I'd recommend going with a month. And when it comes to actually figuring out the challenge itself, like what, what it's going to be about. Choose something that is low friction and it's easy for most individuals to enter into. And again, this is about making it okay for them to feel like it's something they can partake in. It's not too intimidating or too time consuming. We did 30 minutes of movement for 30 days straight, which occurred over the month of September. And the movement could be anything. It could be walking, running, Crotty dancing at a wedding, scaffolding, kickball, spin class yoga. Plotty surfing snowshoeing. Anything goes, as long as you get your butt in So do your best, but don't overthink it. And getting it out there matters more than getting it perfect. Which again is not possible. Tip number four. Take advantage of the tools you already have. This is critical. If you want the challenge to be budget friendly. Now I've been wanting to do a movement challenge with my company for so very And I was determined. I was hell bent that we were going to do one this year. And so in order to reduce any pushback or resistance that can potentially come my way, I made it my mission that I was going to roll out a challenge that had essentially no cost associated to it. And that's exactly what we did. We originally looked at some plugins and some other partners that were really cool, but they all came with dollar signs. So we're like, Nope, we're not doing that. We're going old school. We decided to use. Old trustee. That's right. I'm talking about the one, the only XL. Now Excel has been around a while. She was born in 1985. Now Clippy Clippy came and went real fast, but Excel. Excel is like that. Fine wine of the software world. If you know what I mean. Dependable reliable keeps getting better with age. In all seriousness, this is the tool I would recommend for tracking your movement challenge. And then we paired our fine wine Excel with one of my personal favorite virtual tools, slack. Slack is a tool we already have as well. And this is where we did our initial announcements, our promotions. This is where we messaged the participants and gave them reminders and updates. So we tracked our competition using Excel, and we communicated to our participants in slack. My advice is look at the tools you currently have at your company. And just make those tools work for your program. Tip number five. Set the rules and stick to them. The driver and the supporting cast need to get crystal clear on how things will work for your challenge. Once you've defined the rules of the game. Stick to them. Being fluid with the rules and allowing a whole bunch of exceptions, even when doing a fun event. That is going to lead to outrage from the people participating. I am speaking from experience here from the many years of running different events and competitions at various companies. Expecially expecially when there's any sort of prize involved. Listen, if I've learned anything in my past 20 years in the workforce, it is this. People. We'll do anything. Anything for a t-shirt. I am not kidding. It floors me every time. And myself and two of my other employees who have been responsible from time to time for the creation and the organization and the sending out of t-shirts, it sounds like it's simple folks. But just do this once yourself and you will have a whole new perspective. So, Hey Joe. Hey Jerome. You know what I'm talking about? We could tell you some very fun tales. I talked about Matt Frazier and Tio. Clare to may being beast, will people go, you know, basically full beast mode about anything that has to do with swag, bragging rights and really any sort of competition. So understand when driving any sort of competition at your place of work. People want to know the rules. And just know that beast mode from them will come out. If the rules aren't explicitly followed the same way for everyone, especially when it comes to who won. And who's getting this prize, whether it's bragging rights or something, that's more tangible. This will demotivate them and it will detract them from the very reason you wanted to start this thing. Now the good news. All of this can be very easily avoided. As long as you follow tip number three, which is. Don't try to please everyone, because it's not going to happen because you will have people who want to bend the rules and they're going to be upset when you don't allow the exceptions, but then sticking to this role, tip five, sticking to your rules. You'll be all good. So once you have your rules, then you'll want to document them somewhere where they can be easily accessible to all. And you'll want to hold an information session to review those rules with the people who are interested in participating. Pro tip I always record your information sessions. So that way you don't have to have like six of them and do them all the time for everyone. Do it once record it and then it can be viewed for those who can't attend the session and they can watch it at an asynchronous time that works best for them. If you're interested in what our rules were, this is then. We had basically four first rule was. The competition happened in teams and you could have a team of two to up to 10 people. And you could choose your team, or you could flag yourself to be drafted to a team. Our second role was that. This competition allowed for any sort of movement for 30 minutes a day over the month of September. So if you move more than 30 minutes, great, but it doesn't count as extra credit so any additional movement. Is good for you, but doesn't count. Rule number three, you log your movement in Excel. And we use the honor code to keep this easier to roll out. And then rule number four. The team with the highest average movement for the duration of the month wins. Okay. So those were our four rules. And when we would get questions like, well, Hey, what if I get sick? Or what if I sprained my ankle and I can't move? Or what if I need a rest day? Or can I have 11 people on my team instead of 10? Or I don't want to be on a team. I want to do this by myself. Can I just be on a team of one Can I just work out longer and have that count for the following day? The answer to all of these things was no. No. No. So just get really comfortable with that word. Set the rules stick to them and all will be well in the world. Tip number six. Get competitive for a good reason. People love good, healthy competition and pairing competition with a charity. I think that does something magical and it really gets people motivated in a different way, in a way that's like bigger than something that's just, you know, themselves, Yes, we could have given away apple watches. Well, in this instance, we couldn't because we were keeping it budget friendly, but go with me, you know, we could've given away apple watches or gift cards or refunded a certain amount of money for people who had gym memberships and things like that. But we decided to donate to charity instead. So the winning team got to donate the winners pot. To the charity of their choice. This also helps when people aren't pleased with you saying no about something as you can remind them, Hey, this is all for a good cause. This is why we're doing this. So let's remember it's about creating connections. It's about helping foster health and healthy habits across our community. And it's all going to charity. So get competitive for a good reason. Tip number seven. Get leadership involved. In order for your teams and communities to feel like they can just take the time to do a movement challenge. You really need the leaders to not just passively be bought in, but to actually partake in the event. I could not be prouder of the executive team I work with because 70% of them. Inclusive of our very kick ass CEO. 70% of them participated in our challenge and this modeled something absolutely wonderful to our community. It definitely encourage more individuals to feel like they too can now sign up and participate in the fun. So see if you can get an executive sponsor and partner with them to help you rally at the leadership team at your company to participate in your Tip number eight. B. Data-driven. Most wellness program participation rates are averaging less than 50% of your entire company. But the majority of any sort of program is like 20 to 40% participation rates. So we set our internal target for 20% participation. Cause it was our first time doing it. And so we wanted to set it high, but not something that was going to be, unattainable for us to hit. But we set 20% and we hit that exactly on the mark. In addition to sending a participation target. And then measuring your baseline of where you landed. We also did a survey at the end of our program for all of our participants, and we essentially asked for specific questions. The first one was around. Our goal of this program to help build connection and community while encouraging healthy habits. And how valuable was it in helping to meet the school? And basically there was a scale of one through five being extremely valuable, two, not valuable at all. Question number two how did this competition motivate you? Around your own exercise habits. And basically again, we had a scale of one to five. The third was, open answer to people. What was your favorite part of this competition? And then finally, another open question. Do you have any suggestions to improve this for the next time we do it at our company. So from this, we now have very robust data points that will allow us to improve any future movement challenge. We do. Tip number nine, hype it up. This event should be hyped and promoted before the challenge throughout the challenge. And as the challenge closes and here are a couple ideas to keep things fresh and hyped. The first is to begin with some sort of fun name or theme. And the next time we run this in the spring, this is something I want to do because we did not have the opportunity to do it this time, but get your whole. Company involved. Make it a competition to name the challenge, and then people will vote on which name they liked the best. And that will be the name of So just a great way to get some early promotion and get some people excited and already engaged in the program itself. The second is to use enticing video clips and visuals. So we made short videos using Canva to promote and increase interest. Canva's a tool we already have. It's essentially like a design tool and it makes people who aren't brilliant with design like me over here. Um, and when I put things together in there, it's like, oh, what graphic designer did you use? This is beautiful. Um, it was me. Thank you so much in Canva. Canva's again, a tool that we already have, so you could do the same thing in PowerPoint and a word doc. You don't, again, you don't want to, it doesn't have to be fancy, but get some exciting enticing video clips and visuals out there. We also made zoom backgrounds, order to spread awareness about what this program was. So kind of leading up to September, we had them as a backdrop for our driver and supporting CAS. And then during the program, We gave that same background to all the people who are participating. So they could use that and kind of keep things pumped throughout the whole And then finally we use slack to keep the competitive spirit alive throughout the competition. We had teams posting their workouts through texts and pictures. And then we did some weekly water cooler questions throughout the month about movement topics to get the whole community talking. And just some examples one was a question like what was your favorite way to move and play as a kid? And that was really fun and brought back a lot of cool memories, about four square and Dodge ball and capture the flag. Another question that we put out there was. What would your Olympic sport be that you'd want to meddle in? And so hearing people talk about those sports again, just super fun and another way to engage the community. Tip number 10. Have fun. We spend so much time at work and so much time with our coworkers. Don't we want it to be enjoyable. Don't we want to smile. Don't we want to look forward to the things that you do. I do. That's the type of environment I want to work in. And that's the type of environment I want to foster each and every day. I do not want to work at an environment where I'm dragging my button to work and just totally. Uh, why am I here? When am I off like, that just sounds horrible. So if you're with me on this, like let's make it fun for the people and make it fun for ourselves. Because when your community has fun and sees how much you care and you're investing in them. I guarantee that will be reciprocated. Recap time. 10 tips for running a movement challenge at your place of work. Tip number one, determine your why. Tip number two, identify a driver and a supporting cast. Tip number three. You can't please, everyone. To for take advantage of the tools you already have tip five, set the rules and stick to them. Tip six, get competitive for a good reason. Tip seven. Get leadership involved. Tip eight. Be data-driven. Tip nine, hype it up. And finally tip 10, have fun. This challenge was so rewarding and I'm thrilled that we took And we got it out there. We didn't wait for the perfect tool or the perfect time or the perfect budget. And I am beyond proud of this budget friendly challenge. We were able to provide to our community and I'm so very thankful for the driver, the supporting cast and all of the participants at my company who made this happen. Leaders, all of you listening. I am officially throwing out the gauntlet. Get to action, make it happen for your people too. So what'd you think of this episode? I'm hoping it sparks some ideas, some motivation around how you might also roll out a movement challenge at your own place of If you like what you heard. I would so very much appreciate you leaving a rating and review. Thank you so much for your time today with me, new episodes are coming out each and every week. Be bold, be bright. And be a leader who's modeling the importance of prioritizing your health through movement. Until next time. Cheers.