Challenges have become one of, if not, the most popular well-being program strategy and a fan favorite among participants. The topics available from providers are immense, there’s plenty of opportunity to sync devices, and social components have been added to make them fun and interactive.

One question, however, remains and we get asked about it a lot from clients: should we setup our challenge as team or individual?

Let’s start with the advantages of an individual challenge:
1) Participants can join easily. No need to find teammates. Click join and done.
2) Participants don’t need to rely on others for success.
3) Participants can set goals according to their own level of well-being.

As you can see, there are some things about individual challenges that might be considered good. However, by running an individual challenge you’re missing out on perhaps the greatest feature of all: social support.

Team challenges allow for the power of social support, camaraderie, and accountability. When participants have their coworkers counting on them and, most importantly, supporting them– they do better!

Team challenges spin the idea of competition on its head. With individual challenges each participant succeeds by their coworkers doing worse than them. However, participants in team challenges are motivated to cheer their coworkers on as their success is shared.

So, team challenges are clearly superior to individual challenges. But, with team-based challenges you still have various teams competing within the organization. The ultimate scenario would be if your entire company was on the same team! Everyone supporting one another and everyone’s success is shared success.

Historically, setting up a challenge like this was impossible. Until now! AIPM is hosting an intercompany challenge where you sign up as a company and compete against other companies.