In today's world, staying healthy and providing opportunities to employees to meet their wellness and health goals is paramount. At SoftPro, we believe that healthy and happy employees make customers happy. Multiple studies show that wellness programs improve health, morale, loyalty, and productivity of employees. As a result of this commitment to our employees and customers, SoftPro has been named the Best Company to Work every year since 2012 and won a Blue Cross Blue Shield Corporate Philanthropy award this year.
To continue our tradition of investing in health and wellness programs for our teams, we've kicked off our 2018 Wellness Challenge, designed to encourage our employees to make healthy lifestyle choices!
This year's challenge is the continuation of the health program we started last year, when we challenged our employees to participate in the biggest loser competition. Over 178 contestants joined the challenge, and over 18 weeks of competition, SoftPro lost an amazing 763.7 pounds! Wow!
"Participating in the Biggest Loser Contest last year was a great experience for me not only because I lost over 53 lbs, but also because of the major lifestyle changes I made for myself moving forward: daily exercise and healthy eating habits. I had a lot of fun and am very thankful to SoftPro for supporting its employees through fitness programs/competitions like the Biggest Loser contest and the Wellness Challenge."
Ken Byrd, SoftPro employee and the SoftPro Biggest Loser finalist.
Unlike last year's program, this year's 16 week challenge is focused on healthy lifestyle choices rather than weight loss goals. It consists of 8 Sprint Challenge Periods, lasting two weeks each. During each Sprint Period, participants have a choice to participate in 16 different Sprint Challenge options to earn Wellness points, Sprint Raffle Tickets and Grand Prize Raffle Tickets.
Here are some of the challenges we've set for ourselves this summer:
- Step challenge – 8,000, 10,000 or 12,000 steps each day for 10 days
- Stair challenge – 6 floors, 2 times daily for 10 days
- Run/Walk 5k
- Work out sessions – 8 or 10 sessions in Sprint period
- Food Diary – record 3 meals and snacks for 10 or 14 days, including calorie and or nutritional values
- Try new exercise activity – 2x per week for total of 4 times
- Plank, abs or squat challenge
Upon successful completion of these challenges, employees will earn wellness points for each sprint to buy prizes at the end of 16 weeks.
As the challenge kicked off, it's exciting to see how inspired and excited our employees are to add extra activity to their daily lives, and be rewarded for that! Can't be better than this, right?
In addition to offering these types of wellness challenges, our teams also enjoy the following fitness benefits:
- Fitness center reimbursement
- To the Finish Line – race entry fee reimbursement
- Onsite Weight Watchers meetings and discounted rates to join
- Wellness Lunch and Learns
- Weekly fresh fruit delivery
