Your company’s performance depends in many ways on the behavior and habits of your employees: from completing their tasks correctly and on time, following safety guidelines, sleeping, eating, and exercising enough, to being friendly and helpful toward colleagues and clients. While it’s easy to think of behaviors that could benefit both your employees and your business, the challenge is encouraging your workforce to adopt them!
Our solution is a feature we call “Challenges.” It incentivizes your employees to engage in activities by making them both fun and rewarding. Need your employees to hand in their hours on time? Turn it into a challenge and cut the number of late timesheets by more than half. You can turn nearly any activity that advances your business objectives into a challenge and not only get your employees to do it, but want to do it too. Read on to find out how to make the most of our Challenges feature to achieve a range of different business and engagement goals.
The keys elements of a challenge
Challenges are customizable and engaging feed posts that invite your employees to do something specific. To participate in the challenge, employees must submit their evidence or proof, in the form of a video, photo, or text post on the feed. And in return they receive a designated number of virtual coins.
Steps to create an effective challenge
To create an effective challenge, you simply need to identify:
· The desired activity you want your employees to engage in
· The proof you’ll ask them to submit
The desired activity and the proof will be identical when the behavior you want to promote is just to share something on the feed. Employees sharing photos of their pets, Christmas tree, or favorite place to hike works to strengthen sense of community and helps build connections. You can very effectively boost sharing activity of this kind by turning it into a challenge.
While what a challenge asks your employees to do is crucial, the how you ask or invite them is important as well. Turn your post into something they’ll enjoy reading – use appealing graphics, insert a lighthearted joke, make it short and fun!
For example:
invite your employees to recognize the workmates who they feel always go the extra mile – challenge them to tag a colleague with the hashtag #MySuperhero.
ask your employees to create a healthy meal that includes 5 different colors – challenge them to post a photo of the result.
If you lack the time to create a challenge from scratch, use a premade one from our vast library! In our experience, many of our clients have similar values and objectives and want to nudge their employees in the same directions. We’ve created extensive collections of challenges for universal employer goals such as wellness, teamwork, innovation, productivity, and more.
When to use each kind of challenge
Whether you create your own challenge or use a premade one, you’ll need to decide whether to make it a ‘comment’ or a 'post’ challenge.
In a comment challenge, employee submissions appear as comments to the challenge post. Whereas in a post challenge, employee submissions appear as independent posts in the feed. In both cases, your challenge has a unique hashtag that appears automatically on submission posts and identifies them as such.
Choose a comment challenge if you want all submissions to appear in a single place on your feed – a kind of communal story readers can scroll through all at once. This option is usually better for text-only responses such as the #MySuperhero challenge.
Choose a post challenge if you want to liven up your feed with a large variety of posts. This option is better for photo or video challenges, such as the healthy meal in 5 colors challenge.
Meet broader goals with multiple, featured challenge collections
Many goals are too broad to address in a single challenge. Using several simultaneous challenges allows you to attack such a goal from multiple directions. For example, announce a ‘wellness week’ at your company and invite your employees to submit five different wellness-focused challenges. (The premade options here are endless: no-elevators day, 5-minute plank, meditation, etc.). To ensure everyone gets a chance to participate, give your employees the whole week to make their submissions and set no limit on the number of participants. And to ensure no one misses them, choose to ‘feature’ your challenges - they will all appear in a "Don't Miss" section above your feed for the entire week.
Get fast results with timed, limited participation challenges
When you need fast results - use a challenge with a strategic expiration date and participation limit for immediate impact. For example, one of our customers reported that her employees were always late turning in their monthly reports, which led to managers scrambling at the last minute to analyze the data. We suggested she use a challenge inviting employees to submit their report two days early and to reward only the first 200 participants! Employees rushed to submit their reports and the managers got the time to prepare careful analyses and summaries.
Determine your rewards wisely
Not all challenges are equally challenging, so it makes sense to give bigger rewards for the more demanding ones. Tagging a work-friend with the hashtag #YouMadeMeSmile is easy, so make it worth only five coins. Showing proof that you’ve completed a two-hour training session is significantly more challenging, so make it worth much more.
Similarly, as not all employee behaviors will be equally important to you, you can offer bigger rewards for the behaviors that have a greater impact on things that matter to you.
Challenge accepted!
Now that you know all about the Eloops Challenges feature, you can start using it to boost engagement and promote employee behaviors that advance your company goals. Get started with setting your first challenge and see for yourself what a powerful tool it is.
Want to learn more? Go to our Challenges Help Center article >>