An active community in HeiaHeia is a good foundation for a variety of wellbeing initiatives. This article shares best practices for building your HeiaHeia community.
Depending on your plans, you may seek to activate a large community quickly, or keep building a “wellbeing movement” over time. HeiaHeia is designed for long-term use and sustained benefits, so we highly recommend keeping the long-term view when it comes to building your community, even if you want to get results quickly!
Summary:
- Share the benefits: what’s in it for you!
- Challenges drive engagement
- Ongoing participation and communication
- Share the achievements and buzz
- Reward for participation
- Stakeholder buy-in
- Highlight the many ways to use HeiaHeia
- Make participating easy by keeping joining instructions available in prominent places (intranet etc.)
Share the benefits: what does one get by signing up?
HeiaHeia membership is for everyone, regardless of one’s goals or starting level. HeiaHeia members will feel the motivating impact of the community and also learn new things about colleagues. Members have access to a comprehensive library of valuable wellbeing content from themes like Body, Mind and Better Workday, and can take part in motivating group-wide challenges. As a result, members will find new ways to improve wellbeing with small but meaningful everyday actions - and earn points (as well as possibly win prizes).
Challenges drive engagement
Challenges (joint targets, team races etc.) have been proven to attract members. It’s important to note that you can expect different results for different challenge concepts. We’ve seen one challenge attract 10% of employees to take part, while another challenge attracts 80%.
It’s recommended to keep an open mind and try different types of challenges from different wellbeing themes. You can also set up a year-long program for challenges and frequently communicate that to potential participants throughout the year.
You may also link challenges to causes that people feel important. For example, linking to charity has been proven to have an impact:
- “When we achieve our joint target, we will make a donation to [cause]”
- “Additional exercise hours will increase our donation sum etc.”
You can also run surprise challenges and recognize individual achievement.
Ongoing participation and communication
A growing number of HeiaHeia customers give bonuses based on healthy lifestyle habits using the HeiaHeia wellbeing score as an ongoing system to measure success. This kind of an ongoing system will be guaranteed to keep your members active and healthy.
There are many ways to link HeiaHeia and your wellbeing program to the daily routines of your organisation - make sure not to miss these opportunities! Is ergonomics a concern for remote workers, or do you anticipate stressful times ahead? Maybe it’d be a good time to remind your community that HeiaHeia has content about those themes?
Share the achievements and buzz
Your wellbeing community is constantly generating achievements - completing digital programs, engaging in hundreds of hours of healthy activity, giving thousands of cheers to one another. It’s good to occasionally share these accomplishments with people who are not yet active members and encourage them to join too!
Some ideas: How many cheers have your members given? How many wellbeing points have been earned?
Also, you can organise mini challenges and use those to promote the wellbeing community: “How many different sports can we collect in one week?”
Reward for participation
You can use small rewards to motivate people to join your community. Participation is not complex or time consuming, so sometimes a small nudge is all that’s needed. Rewarding examples:
- All new members will get [reward] after joining
- Lottery between all new members
- Join and collect 60 points to earn [reward]
- Join and collect 70 000 steps to earn a Garmin device
- All members can use one day of working time to develop one’s own wellbeing
Stakeholder buy-in
When your executive team, managers and other key personnel participate, your community will attract more members. Promoting wellbeing benefits all parties (the company, the management and the employees).
Could you e.g. reward managers that have attracted the most members from their teams to join?
Highlight the many ways to use HeiaHeia
Wellbeing can mean different things for individuals. For example, some people don’t like to participate in exercise challenges. Remember to highlight that HeiaHeia is much more than a way to track exercises. With HeiaHeia, anyone can improve one’s holistic wellbeing and have a good time while doing that.