Wellness Games Encourage a Fitter Workforce

This spring the city of Charlotte challenged its employees to log their workouts on a website that tallied points for each department. Trash talk flew over e-mail and spilled into the hallways of City Hall. If Human Resources was in the lead, “Budget would come back with a reply-all, saying ‘We’ll walk at lunch,’ ” recalls Christina Fath, the city’s wellness administrator. A total of 469 municipal employees took part in the six-week challenge—nearly double the number of participants in years past. This year’s group logged 8,800 hours of exercise—equal to almost half an hour per employee per day.

More employers are catching on to what Charlotte discovered: Tying workplace wellness programs to online games or social media lights a fire under workers as no number of posters in the break room can. “That social aspect creates some level of accountability,” says Brad Bell, an associate professor of HR at Cornell University. “You know that if you don’t show up, people are going to notice.”