As summer rolls around, many remote employees can’t wait to head off on vacations, get into the great outdoors, or simply enjoy a more relaxed pace at home. For HR leaders, this can present some unique challenges around keeping engagement levels up in their wellness programs.
Your remote employees might take a few weeks off work, change their schedules, cover extra work for their colleagues, or prioritize their own leisure activities over work wellness activities. So you’ll need to think about how to adapt your programs and promotions to meet employees where they are during the summer months.
In this article, we’ll look at effective ways to keep employees engaged during summer, together with some summer wellness challenge ideas and seasonal activities that can help them keep wellness top of mind.
How to approach your wellness program and promotion in the summer months
Why is engagement different during summer?
When the warmer weather rolls around, most employees are itching to put on those long-awaited shorts and flip-flops. It’s the time when people look forward to heading into the great outdoors to take a much-needed vacation, or catch up with friends and family for sports, barbecues, and other summer events.
Keeping up with your organization’s wellness program is at risk of becoming waaaaay down their to-do list.
Even if employees are still at their desks over summer, there’s a chance they will automatically feel physically and mentally healthier over this time. The warmer temperatures and increased sunlight hours are a natural mood-booster, so this lays the perfect foundation to leverage the motivation folks have to tend to their well-being this time of year.
Why incentivization becomes more important in summer
To help you keep on track with your organization’s wellness goals and keep programs top-of-mind during the summer, incentivization for employees to engage is key.
You’ll need to think of creative ways to keep employees motivated to participate outside of their summer social life and general work tasks, which means answering their most pressing question “What’s in it for me?”
Wellness platforms such as Bright Breaks make it easy for HR leaders and managers to promote “participate and win” challenges over the summer. Employees can join in at any time, from anywhere, and they will be entered into weekly prize draws just by engaging with the platform. There’s also the opportunity to run challenges just for your organization – more on this later!
Why making an effort to keep engagement up is important
Despite the potentially lower engagement levels in wellness programs, it’s important that you make an effort to keep wellness program participation levels up during summer.
Even if employees are taking vacations, or relaxing with friends, burnout is still possible. Summer stress can rear its head during catch-up time after vacations, covering for coworkers, or trying to juggle a more hectic social schedule with existing workloads.
Wellness doesn’t stop when the sun comes out. By actively promoting its importance you can keep your wellness programs top of mind for employees all year round, reducing the need for a large relaunch or re-introduction of programs when the cooler weather rolls around
The wellness program seasonal engagement dilemma
It’s important to evaluate your well-being initiatives to see how they adapt to remote and summer-specific needs. It’s advisable to track and measure engagement during this time, and compare metrics from last year, so you can have an idea of what to expect with engagement levels and what opportunities present themselves to influence metrics.
If there are wellness programs that present a sharp drop off in program engagement over the summer, this could be a false indication that employees aren’t getting value out of the program as a whole, and this could hurt the chances of getting approval to keep the programs running at renewal time.
With the potential of this lull in mind, it’s important to think about how you’ll promote wellness activities during summer. You also need to consider how you can mitigate the risk of a sharp decline in engagement and provide wellness support to employees who could still use it during this time, while keeping participation metrics at an acceptable level given the circumstances.
Some summer wellness promotion ideas might include:
- Ensuring to make space in employee newsletters to promote wellness themes and initiatives
- Bright Breaks helps with this by providing fresh, free promotional materials every month!
- Team-based and individual wellness challenges
- Implementing wellness activities that are conveniently scheduled for employees
- Bright Breaks does this with wellness activities scheduled directly in employee calendars when it works for them
- Motivating leaders and managers to promote and engage with summer wellness activities themselves and with their teams
- Creating a summer wellness calendar so employees can plan ahead to participate in wellness events and challenges
- Partnering with your wellness committee or ERGs to help boost engagement levels
Summer wellness challenge ideas and activities
To keep engagement levels up over the warmer months, it’s a good idea to include wellness activities that promote summer themes and outdoor activities. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Hydration challenge
Staying hydrated is essential over the summer, especially in hot climates, or if employees are spending more time outdoors during the summer months. Start a challenge for your employees to keep peak hydration levels and maintain their health and focus.
Hydration apps like Waterllama or a daily water tracker makes it simple for employees to measure their progress. You could even add a twist to your challenges by getting employees to share their favorite fruit or herbal infusions to make drinking water that little bit more exciting.
Step challenge
Step challenges are a great wellness activity for any time of year, but it can be even more motivating over summer when your employees are enjoying more hiking, walking, and sports. Create individual and team challenges to see who can get the most steps in during summer.
If you use Bright Breaks, you can access our new step challenge feature and encourage your employees to participate as individuals or in teams. Participants connect their iOS and Android devices to automatically log steps in the live dedicated leaderboard. Reward your top steppers or set an individual goal for steps taken and enter participants into a draw.
Spice up the step challenge by encouraging employees to post photos of where they take their steps, giving them a chance to showcase their local scenery and hiking adventures!
“Eat The Rainbow” challenge
Encourage your employees to make the most of seasonal summer produce and give themselves a health and wellness boost. Promoting an “Eat the Rainbow” challenge is a fun way to do this.
For each meal, challenge your employees to get as many colors on their plate as possible. Not only will this make their meals more visually appealing, but it will also ensure they’re getting a variety of nutrients into their day.
Create a chart for summer foods that correspond with each rainbow color, for example:
- Red – cherries, radishes, beets, strawberries, red apples, tomatoes
- Orange – apricots, carrots, mangoes, sweet potatoes
- Yellow – lemons, yams, zucchini, yellow peppers
- Green – kale, beans, kiwifruit, pears, sugar-snap peas
- Blue – blueberries, blackberries
- Purple – grapes, aubergines, plums
You could incentivize this challenge by getting employees to snap pictures of their colorful plates to share in Slack, and then get everyone to vote on the best looking plates.
Summer photo contest
Eat The Rainbow and Step Challenge photos can also work well within a wider summer photo contest. Encourage your employees to get out and about and capture “summer” in their own way.
Whether it’s a sultry sunset, a field of wildflowers, or family time at the beach, your employees can snap whatever summer means to them, and share their best photos to win prizes.
This challenge encourages employees to get outside, get creative, and share some of their favorite moments with their colleagues. Not only does this challenge promote wellness, it can also help your teams stay connected with each other over the busy summer months.
Park workout challenge
It’s a great time for your employees to take advantage of the warmer weather and explore some new outdoor workouts and activities. Parks are great places to get active and breathe in some fresh air, and there are plenty of online apps they can take with them to get motivated – Bright Breaks included!
With Bright Breaks on their mobile devices, your employees can enjoy an effective 7-minute workout, guided meditation, or HIIT session to get the blood pumping — and maybe even meet some new people as an added bonus.
Ask employees to submit a photo and description of how they worked in a fitness session at their local park and enter all those who participate into a prize draw.
Well-being bingo
Bingo is a perennial favorite in wellness programs. You can theme this challenge however you like to encourage engagement, and to promote physical and mental well-being.
For summertime bingo, you could include squares for:
- Drinking a large glass of water
- Getting 8 hours of sleep
- Eating a piece of summer fruit
- Going for a 5-minute walk
- Cloud-gazing
- Watching a sunrise/sunset
- Catching up with friends or family
- Visiting a farmers market
- Having a tech-free day
- Taking 7-minute breaks on Bright Breaks!
Seasonally Appropriate Keynote Speakers
Keynote speakers can offer your remote employees some expert insights into staying healthy over the summer.
Your speaker should make things informative and motivating, so your employees can act on what they’ve learned. Good topics for summer might include things like summer nutrition, sun safety, or managing mental well-being when vacation planning and life in general starts to feel hectic.
It may be difficult to schedule a keynote speaker that is convenient for employees amidst busy summer schedules. Bright Breaks hosts mini keynote sessions scheduled at different times of the day, allowing for employees to engage with the content as they are able to. The perfect solution to provide valuable content at this time (or any time) of year!
Use technology
Technology can help you remove a lot of the headaches around keeping wellness engagement up over summer. Platforms like Bright Breaks offer fun, inspiring video content with hundreds of wellness and mindfulness activities that are perfect for summer.
From guided workouts, to yoga, to walking meditation sessions, our extensive library of live and pre-recorded activities can help your remote employees maintain a healthy lifestyle and enjoy the season to its fullest.
Conclusion
By incorporating summer-themed activities and challenges into your wellness program, you can keep wellness top of mind for your remote employees.
Whether it’s staying hydrated, preparing colorful meals with seasonal produce, or participating in well-being bingo — promoting fun, summer-y wellness activities can help keep employees interested in your program during what is often a hectic time of year.
Bright Breaks makes it simple to promote wellness over the summer, with effective microbreaks and incentivized challenges to help keep your employees active and healthy.
