Drawing from successful challenges we’ve powered this past year, we’ve put together a top 10 list to help you make employee wellness challenges more strategic and more fun!

1.  Executive Exercise Challenge: Engage your executives as a team in a company-wide challenge.  Let employees form teams of 8-12 to take them on!

2.  Bike-2-Work Challenge: Encourage your employees to get healthy and go green at the same time! Earn points for biking to work or for biking for recreation.

3.  Team Building Challenge: Launch a step or exercise challenge a week or two leading up to an off-site.  Let the teams rally on the last day and celebrate the challenge when you get together!

4.  Location vs. Location Throwdown Challenge: Pick two or more locations, offices, or just different buildings on a campus and encourage natural rivalry in the name of fun!

5.  Eat, Drink, Sleep, Move:  Variety is the spice of life. Let your employees earn points for eating well, sleeping well, and getting their move on!

6.  Community Challenge:  Corporate volunteering can benefit the community, the business and the individual employee.  Let employees team up and earn points for volunteering their time.

7.  Howdy Partner! Challenge: Have you taken on a new supplier, new client or business partner?  Create a challenge by mixing up both populations for a team-building challenge.

8.  Single Function Challenge: Get your entire functional team together for a single or multi-week challenge.  Assign people to teams to mix it up and break up the usual cliques.

9.  Amazing Pace Challenge: Create a multi-leg challenge with steps as the core component. Add a new activity for each leg, for example climbing stairs, exercising or sleeping.  Create step-based milestones for the teams to reach!

10.  New Kid On The Block Challenge: Help new employees get integrated into your company.  Mix them up with current employees or wellness champions into teams of 4-6.   Steps, exercise or multi-point wellness challenges work well.

11. You tell us… send your creative challenge ideas to ideas@rallyon.com and we’ll work with you to set it up!

“A survey of employers released in March by the consulting firm Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health found that about 9% expected to use online games in their wellness programs by the end of this year, with another 7% planning to add them in 2013. By the end of next year, 60% said their health initiatives would include online games as well as other types of competitions between business locations or employee groups.”

RallyOn provides companies like Flextronics and Brocade with corporate wellness programs and employee wellness challenge solutions.

Flextronics planned this challenge to kick off their 2011 U.S. wellness program. They intend to sponsor a number of employee challenges throughout the year to create visibility and action around wellness goals. To help achieve this important objective, they have recruited Wellness Champions at each of 20+ sites around the U.S. to galvanize their fellow employees and provide local leadership for the program.

Flextronics announced the challenge to all U.S. employees via email and distributed pedometers to all participating employees. The challenge was planned to run for 4 weeks with a nominal prize (and bragging rights) for the top stepping teams. More than 200 teams comprised of 12 employees each organized themselves off-line and signed up on the RallyOn website. Captains were able to take advantage of RallyOn’s new Captain-tracking™ feature, allowing captains to track for manufacturing employees who do not have readily available internet access.

During the challenge, Flextronics employees logged over 577 million steps and participants averaged over 9,000 steps per day. By the end of the challenge 80% of the individual competitors were still actively involved. Additionally, 39% of surveyed employees lost weight during the challenge and 47% lowered their stress level.

“This challenge exceeded our expectations! The site wellness champions were instrumental in helping form teams as well as participating in the challenge. RallyOn provided the tools and support for our employees to be successful! We hope this is the beginning of changing employee behaviors and creating a sense of community around wellness.” Suzan Ramsey, Senior Director, U.S. Benefits.

The group was very social and took full advantage of the RallyOn “Challenge Wall”. The group posted team photos and made more than 800 other wall posts, many of which mentioned walking, sports, and exercise groups that had formed during the challenge. Many users appreciated the way the challenge brought the company together.
“I enjoyed the feeling of camaraderie with all the walkers in the hallways during breaks and lunch time. Everyone was friendly and felt a feeling of connection with other walkers as we passed in the hallways,” said one participant.

RallyOn and Flextronics’ success demonstrates the powerful impact that social and competitive experiences can have on driving wellness in corporations.

About RallyOn

RallyOn, launched in 2010 in Menlo Park, California, brings gaming to work. RallyOn’s fun web- and mobile-based corporate challenge platform helps corporations engage employees in health behavior change. Challenges bring gaming benefits to any activity where competition among individuals or teams, or even a group goal, can be used to encourage desired behaviors. RallyOn has combined the universal appeal of gaming with the convenience of mobility and the power of employee initiative to help corporations drive organization performance.

RallyOn: Changing the Game at Work
www.RallyOn.com.

New name better aligns with the company’s mission to help organizations rally employees around their collective well-being using social and mobile gaming

March 30, 2012, Menlo Park, CA: Vivecoach, a leading corporate wellness challenge company, announced today that the company has changed its name to RallyOn. The new name better reflects the company’s exclusive focus on bringing teaming and persistent engagement to corporate wellness through online social gaming.

“Changing our name to RallyOn allows us to reinforce our mission to bring social gaming and teaming to corporate wellness with a customizable solution that can be used to engage all employees, from a company’s call-center or production workers to their executive leadership,” says Doug Keare, RallyOn CEO and co-founder.

The RallyOn solution features a web and mobile challenge platform that delivers an unlimited variety of activity-based challenges. Challenges focus on a range of activities from exercise and weight-loss to nutrition and green or community-focused activities. RallyOn partners with companies to understand their corporate objectives and helps design the best challenges and campaigns to ensure long-term success. An advanced analytics and scoring engine provides companies with detailed real-time reports.

“Human resources and benefits administrators often don’t have the resources to individually engage employees in wellness, but they can rally wellness champions to create challenges, assemble teams and compete their way to being healthy,” added RallyOn Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder Jennifer Gill Roberts, “We know that team-based challenges bring people together and inspire them to rally one another across geographies and product lines in order to achieve a common goal. RallyOn drives that process.”

About RallyOn
RallyOn brings the power of social gaming to employee wellness programs to help organizations build healthier, more productive cultures through team-based, tailored wellness challenges. Launched in 2010 in Menlo Park, California, RallyOn has deployed workplace wellness programs to corporations and institutions around the world. Today, RallyOn’s health and wellness programs average more than 70% employee engagement. More information about RallyOn is available at www.rallyon.com.

Media Contact:
Darcy Provo, Brazer Communications for RallyOn
darcy@brazercommunications.com
415-871-1731

Last summer we had the pleasure of attending the Healthcare Unbound Conference where we heard our sponsor from Brocade, Lisa McGill, VP Worldwide Resources, talk about Wellness at Brocade. Lisa shared with the audience how RallyOn has become a key part of Brocade’s strategy to promote wellness through their private, online social platform, the B- Hive. RallyOn challenges are core to the WellFit program and enable Brocade to tap into the creative energies of employee groups world-wide.

Using RallyOn’s challenge tool, Brocade employees have successfully participated in numerous corporate challenges including a global exercise challenge which included the executive team, a bike to work challenge leading up to Earth Day, and a Brocade “Family Challenge“ to encourage employees to be active with their families. “We believe that it is important to include employees’ family members so these lifestyle changes become more sustainable”, says McGill.

“We are delighted that these seasoned investors have partnered with us to fulfill our vision of revolutionizing corporate wellness through gaming,” says RallyOn co-founder and CEO Doug Keare. “They really understand what it takes to build a significant business and are providing incredibly valuable insight and guidance.”

The new funding will allow RallyOn to expand its marketing and direct sales efforts and continue to push the envelope on creating the simplest, most rewarding user experience for corporate employees. The RallyOn service is currently being used by employees in over 20 countries as executives everywhere are eager to bring visibility and action to their corporate wellness efforts while improving teamwork and morale.

“RallyOn’s early customer success proves the effectiveness of their gamification approach to wellness and employee engagement. This financing will help them expand their direct sales efforts and pursue key strategic partnerships,” says co-lead investor Konstantin Othmer.

To kick off the challenge, the company’s top 12 executives formed a team and challenged all employees to compete against them in teams of 12. In all, 44 teams comprising 531 employees joined the challenge. Brocade set a target of 30 minutes of exercise per day per participant. The goal for this challenge was consistency and engagement in getting a large number of employees to exercise a healthy amount on a daily basis. If each member of a team completed 30 minutes of exercise for at least 10 of the 14 challenge days, that team was eligible to win Brocade-branded fitness gear. Bonus points and prizes were also doled out for completing “extra credit” activities. Ultimately most teams appeared to value the bragging rights, team building, and competition above the prizes.

By the end of the challenge 70% of the teams and 75% of the individual competitors reached or surpassed the 10-days-of-activity goal. Two hundred competitors reached the 30-minute threshold for all 14 days and one team finished with a perfect score. In all, 97% of all competitors actively participated in the challenge; a huge success for a group of this size. Setting a pragmatic, attainable target helped get more employees involved and taught them that completing the AHA-recommended exercise amount was achievable. Further, the teaming that occurred over the course of the challenge helped these employees keep one another on-track and accountable for their exercise goals.

“This challenge was a huge hit at Brocade and we look forward to doing many more challenges with RallyOn!” Lisa McGill: VP Worldwide HR-Brocade, Chair of WellFit Committee.

The group was very social and took full advantage of the RallyOn “Challenge Wall”. The group posted team photos and made more than 600 other wall posts, many of which mentioned walking, sports, and exercise groups that had formed during the challenge. Many users committed that they would continue to exercise with their new groups after the challenge ended.

“The exercise challenge encouraged me and a few of my coworkers to start playing squash at lunchtime. The challenge is over, but we’ve decided to keep playing a few times each week,” said one participant.

Other participants reached out to RallyOn for more challenges to keep them going.

“Just finished the challenge! I’m feeling light, energetic and I lost a few pounds. Looking forward to a similar challenge in the future,” said another.

RallyOn continues to demonstrate the value of fun and social interaction in bringing visibility and action to corporate wellness efforts. Employees’ acceptance of events and programs that can improve their health behaviors, while having fun with their co-workers and building esprit de corps, is being well proven.