For over two months, we have been working from home. It is challenging to work without your team by your side. Keeping the team spirit high is rather tricky when we are home by ourselves sitting in a chair with our eyes locked on our computer screens all day. To motivate our employees to do something positive together with their team and to get some exercise in, I put together a series of challenges for the first-ever Nortal Virtual Championship. Any one of our employees, from anywhere in the world, was able to take part while staying socially distant!
Background
The key to a successful Championship is that there has to be something for everyone. That was definitely a challenge for me to figure out! Also, with Nortal’s offices located in different cities around the world, I had to consider the various pandemic restrictions so that everyone would have a fair shot at participating (offering indoor alternatives for outdoor challenges, etc.).
I decided to divide the Championship into a three-weeks-long series. Each week would start on Monday with me sending out the list of challenges to the team captains and last until Sunday when the team results had to be submitted. Each week, the categories remained the same, but the challenges were different.
The five categories I chose for our Championship were strength, cardio, dance, fun and a bonus challenge. The bonus challenge was something more difficult that not everyone was able to achieve. On the final week, there was also a surprise challenge thrown into the mix. It gave me the chance to award the extraordinary talent in Nortal. It was truly inspiring to see how many amazing co-workers we have!
5 top picks for challenges
During the three-weeks-long Championship, we had 16 different challenges in total — and it was terrific seeing how many teams were really trying their best and gave all the challenges a fair try.
My top 5 picks from our Championship:
- Plank challenge (strength) — a challenge that is achievable to everyone, points were given based on the combined team time
- Running challenge (cardio) — a true classic and something most of our employees really enjoy; the distance was 2 x 5km or 1 x 10km run, so nothing bone breaking
- Gangnam style challenge (dance) — a dance that most of the world knows and enjoys dancing along to
- Water bottle challenge (fun) — not so easy to achieve but everyone definitely had fun while trying
- Headstand challenge (bonus) — surprisingly, many people from our company were able to do it
These were some of the challenges with the highest engagement and that work well under any circumstances. Even grown men were ready to dance with joy to get those extra points in!
3 takeaways from organizing such an event
There are certainly things I learned from this experience! As the challenges were from different categories, which made it hard to figure out a good system for submitting the results, I just used a Word file that required more manual work at the end of the week.
Calculating the points at the end of each week for such a large number of teams took a good deal of commitment, so optimizing my time became useful. Also, it is essential to be clear about the objectives of the Championship. At Nortal, I organized the events for the purposes of fun, teamwork and staying active.
I have so many good emotions from organizing the Nortal Virtual Championship. I was positively surprised that 28 teams signed up for the competition and fully committed to participating. If you are thinking about organizing something like this at your company, I have only one thing to say — go for it; it’s worth the effort!
Check out some pictures here on our Instagram @Nortal_life as well!
