Whether virtual, in the workplace, or some hybrid of both, summer is a great time to encourage your employees to reprioritize their health! From eating healthier to enjoying more outdoor activities, taking mental health breaks to simply getting more rest, these simple summer wellness challenges ideas address holistic well-being.

1. Nutrition Challenge Ideas The benefits of healthy eating can be seen in virtually every aspect of your health. Fresh, local summer produce is incredibly healthy as it tends to contain little to no preservatives or chemicals and seasonal fruits and vegetables are packed with nutrients and antioxidants. While cucumbers, cantaloupe, and watermelon also contain high water content, which prevents dehydration, berries, lemons, limes, avocados, apples, cherries, tomatoes, mangos, corn, and beans contain healthy vitamins and nutrients.

Consider implementing employee well-being programs with nutrition wellness challenge activities to boost employee immune systems and promote healthy homemade food. Some ideas include weekly summer potlucks, summer recipe swaps, sustainability challenges to encourage employees grow their produce, offering coupons to local farmers markets, sponsoring a community garden, and/or adding fresh season fruits and vegetables to breakrooms and snack stations.

2. Physical Health Challenge Ideas

With summer’s fresh air and sunshine, summer is a great time to encourage employees to rejuvenate their bodies with the right wellness activities. Implementing some fun, summer-themed wellness challenge activities are the best way to keep teams active, engaged, and healthy.

Some basic challenge ideas include getting 30 minutes of daily summer exercise, 8K daily step count, bike to work/store, encouraging employees to take the stairs, swimming competitions, and other such personal wellness challenges. Team challenges are also effective for driving engagement. Team challenges may include outdoor sports like volleyball, baseball, hiking, fun runs, walking groups, and other outdoor sports.

3. Emotional Well-Being Challenge Ideas

The pandemic wreaked havoc employees’ mental health and emotional well-being. The uncertainty about the global situation, combined with social isolation, remote working, work burnout, and family demands, affected employee health and well-being. Helping your teams disconnect from the emotional stressors can help them get back to their healthy selves and enjoy lower stressed lives.

Some summer themed mental well-being challenge ideas include yoga sessions, motivating talks, breathing exercises, eating healthy, and hobby sessions. Employers may also arrange for one-on-one counseling and therapy sessions to support employees struggling with more serious mental health episodes.

4. Social Wellness Challenges Ideas

Most everyone is craving social connection and human interaction, so it makes sense for employers to focus on social wellness, at the personal and occupational levels, via employee well-being programs.

Some great social wellness challenge ideas include volunteering sessions, non-work virtual interactions, trainings on time management, and other workplace benefits packages that can help employees reconnect with their co-workers and others for their social, occupational, and emotional well-being.

5. Financial Health Challenge Ideas

Financial wellness challenge ideas and workplace benefits packages may include health insurance, HSAs, 401(K) plans, paid leaves, maternity/paternity leaves, student loans & scholarships, and more. To ensure your summer-themed holistic wellness challenge ideas are attractive to your teams, consider conduct pulse surveys or polls to assess employee interests and requirements. By identifying your teams’ financial challenges and/or stresses, employers can tailor their programs accordingly. Doing so can help ensure employees get the required support resources, feel good about themselves, enjoy a happy healthy summer, and make the most of their employee well-being programs.