Fitness Challenge Blog

Boost Your Employee Challenge using Slack or Microsoft Teams

Using collaboration tools to improve challenge participation and simplify communications.

October 23, 2022 by Joseph

We now work in a widely dispersed workplace. Some co-workers are at the local office, others are working from home, while even more are scattered around the globe. In this new workplace, traditional means of communication are inefficient: conference calls take time to set up and often unnecessary for all to attend, email does not always make it to all stakeholders, and chat threads are generally siloed and hard to follow. In all cases, the result of this communication is ephemeral due to a lack of simple recording and often must be repeated.

Collaboration Apps

Collaboration apps have come a long way in remedying these shortfalls. With apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams, users can now seamlessly work together through a variety of apps. Most importantly, the concept of a channel was invented to allow all participants in a particular project or team to consolidate communications and provide a lasting thread to tie work artifacts and deliverables together. Users of these collaboration tools generally leave them open throughout the workday and use other built-in applications without leaving the collaboration app or switching context.

The advent of modern collaboration tools also resolves a major shortfall of communication-heavy external applications: email is unreliable and additional chat apps are cumbersome and often ignored. Communications is very important to a successful employee fitness challenge for many reasons: potential participants need to be notified that a challenge is happening, feedback needs to be provided as leaderboards, comments and encouragement needs to be fostered, and results given.

ChallengeRunner, Slack, and Teams

Because of this, ChallengeRunner has integrated into both the Slack and Microsoft Teams collaboration apps. Now, challenge admins can easily add ChallengeRunner to either of the platforms and specify a channel to use for communications. This provides many benefits including:

• Easily notify participants of upcoming challenges. Simply invite participants to the wellness challenge channel you created and send participants messages directly or let ChallengeRunner notify them of important dates.
• Allow participants to register directly through the collaboration app. Participants can either click a button to register in the collaboration platform or be automatically registered when they open the ChallengeRunner app.
• Single sign on (SSO) is included automatically. A participant creates a ChallengeRunner account just once and then are automatically signed in any time they open the ChallengeRunner app through Slack or Teams.
• Daily leaderboard updates can be automatically sent from ChallengeRunner to the channel to provide additional motivation and camaraderie.
• While the built-in messaging and chat functions are still available through ChallengeRunner, the available Slack or Teams channel communications make them largely unnecessary.
• All user functions found in ChallengeRunner can be used in the website, desktop, or mobile versions of either Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Effective communications from external applications have always been difficult. Embedding ChallengeRunner within the world’s most popular collaboration apps is a major step in enhancing employee participation in wellness challenges as well as the simplifying challenge management for admins. For more information on integrating with Slack, please see: Slack Integration with ChallengeRunner and Authorize ChallengeRunner to Integrate with Slack. For more information on integrating with Microsoft Teams, please see: Microsoft Teams Integration with ChallengeRunner and Authorize ChallengeRunner to Integrate with Teams.

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