How to launch a company step challenge in one afternoon

A workplace step challenge does not need a project plan, a launch committee, or three weeks of prep. With the right tool you can decide the goal, set it up, and invite the whole company between lunch and end of day. Here is exactly how to run one this afternoon, and where the old spreadsheet approach quietly steals your time.

Why an afternoon is realistic (and why it used to take weeks)

The reason step challenges feel like work is that most of them are run by hand. Someone builds a tracking spreadsheet, emails everyone a set of instructions, chases people for their weekly totals, keeps a leaderboard updated manually, and then personally buys and mails the prizes at the end. That is not a challenge, it is a part-time job.

A purpose-built app removes every one of those chores, which is what collapses the timeline from weeks to an afternoon. The steps below assume you are using one. If you are still on spreadsheets, the same plan works, it just costs you the busywork at each step.

Before you start: three quick decisions

You only need to settle three things before you touch the dashboard. None of them takes long.

• The goal. Pick one shared target the whole company is walking toward. A collective distance goal is the most fun version: "let's walk from Paris to Barcelona as a company" or "let's cross Canada coast to coast together" turns everyone's steps into one moving story. Every step from every person counts toward the same line on the map.
• The prize. Decide what a winner gets. Because everyone who reaches the goal is entered into a random draw, you are not just rewarding your fittest employee. The person who does a calm 6am dog walk has the same shot as the marathoner, which is exactly why casual participants bother to join.
• The dates. Two weeks is a good first run: long enough to build a habit, short enough to keep energy up. You can always run another.

Set it up (about 20 minutes)

This is the part people brace for and then finish faster than expected. From the web admin dashboard you create your company, name the challenge, set the shared goal and the dates, and set the prize once. That last part matters: you set the reward in the dashboard and the platform handles getting it to the winner later, so there is no gift-card errand hanging over the end of the challenge.

You do not need to import wearable data, wire up integrations, or configure anything technical. Employees will track steps from the phone already in their pocket, so there is nothing for you to provision.

Invite everyone (10 minutes)

With the challenge built, you invite your people. In a Canadian workplace this is where a small detail earns real goodwill: the interface, the notifications, and the invitations are all bilingual in English and French, so every employee joins and competes in their own language rather than squinting at a translation. Nobody is a second-class participant in their own wellbeing program.

A good app also chases the non-joiners for you. Instead of you sending three rounds of "did you sign up yet" reminders, the platform nudges people who have not joined and re-engages those who have gone quiet. That automatic follow-up is usually the difference between a challenge that fizzles after day one and one that actually builds momentum.

These are capability-and-fact statements, not customer claims. Movemint is a new product, so we do not show customer logos or testimonials we have not earned.

Let it run (zero minutes a day)

Once it is live, the point is that you do nothing. Employees track steps automatically from their phones, the shared goal meter fills as the company logs miles, and the leaderboard updates itself. Motivational push notifications keep people checking in without you drafting a single message. Your job for the next two weeks is basically to watch the map fill in.

On the privacy question that a Canadian workforce will ask: the app collects only step count, distance, and calories. No heart rate, sleep, GPS or location, weight, or medical data. And you as the admin see aggregate engagement, not a per-employee daily-step report, so nobody feels watched. Employee data is stored in Canada, in Amazon Web Services' Canadian region (ca-central-1, in Montreal), which makes the answer to your privacy review a short one.

Reward and report (5 minutes)

When the challenge ends, this is where the old way falls apart and the new way barely registers. There is no tallying, no gift-card run, no envelopes. Everyone who reached the goal is in the draw, a winner is drawn, and built-in gift-card fulfillment gets the prize to them. You never buy or mail anything.

Then you pull the participation numbers to show leadership the wellbeing spend landed. That is the entire close-out: draw the winner, let fulfillment handle the prize, share the engagement snapshot. The afternoon you spent launching is the only real time the whole program costs you.

What it costs, and how to try it

Movemint is priced at a flat $1.50 USD per employee per month, with the CAD equivalent shown for Canadian companies. Billing is monthly, so there is no annual contract to sign before you have seen it work. The honest way to evaluate a wellbeing tool is to launch one real challenge and watch your own participation curve, which is exactly what an afternoon setup lets you do.

Frequently asked questions

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