9 Ways To Celebrate Wellness Month Virtually This August

August is Wellness Month. But this year, it looks quite different than ever before. With social distancing guidelines still strictly in place to curb the spread of the novel Coronavirus, many companies are left scratching their heads, searching for ways to celebrate Wellness Month virtually. 

To help you make the most of the holiday, we asked 9 small- and mid-sized businesses how they’re celebrating Wellness Month this year. 

Here’s how they plan on commemorating the holiday differently due to COVID-19: 

Subsidizing Therapy

“For Wellness month, we're subsidizing therapy. Through our employee engagement surveys, our team has told us how the whole pandemic and adjustment to working from home has been challenging and stressful. Many have to balance work life with child care, for example. We think subsidizing therapy will give our team an outlet to improve their mental health and their productivity at work. If a number of our employees take advantage of the benefit, we want to introduce ginger.io, a tele-therapy service, as a benefit for our entire team.” - Neal Taparia, CEO of Solitaired

Healthy Meal Services & Music Streaming

“For Wellness Month, we are celebrating by giving all of our employees access to a healthy meal service. They will get healthy smoothies sent to their homes weekly for the entire month. We also got a company-wide membership to a music streaming service that we will keep long-term to help employees relax during the work week. Wellness Month seems like the perfect time to go a little beyond our normal benefits, especially with the stress of the pandemic.” 

Wellness- and Fitness-Related Gifts

“As a fitness company, we prioritize wellness every month, but COVID-19 has absolutely spurred us to do some extra wellness celebration this August. Our team is spread out all over the world so we’ve had to get creative in our virtual wellness celebrations. We’ve decided to celebrate Wellness Month by gifting each member of our team with a wellness-related item of their choice. We sourced several gift options from some of our favorite fitness and wellness companies so they can pick which they’d like best. Some of the wellness gift choices were a new yoga mat, a mini blender, or a weighted blanket.” - Tyler Read, CEO of PTPioneer

Saturday Sweat-Out

“We have implemented a Saturday Sweat-Out activity for this month. Every Saturday, my employees and I will work out together virtually. We will be working out together via Zoom and will follow the same workout routine. This way, we can promote lifestyle change and can promote health and well-being despite the pandemic.” - Matt Scott, Owner of Termite Survey

21 Days of Gratefulness Challenge

“Since challenges have become such a hit during the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to include it in our Wellness Month celebration. We asked everyone on the team to post statuses every day for 21 days about what they are grateful for. This helps us all realize how lucky we are and helps us be more appreciative of the simple things.” - Alicia Hough, Corporate Wellness Expert at The Product Analyst

A Focus on Mindfulness

“For fifteen minutes each day, our team takes a mindfulness check collectively and delves into the current situation we are facing on a personal, professional, global, psychological, and economic level.” - Stanislao Marrazzo, Co-Founder, Italian Food Online Store 

Tea Breaks

“For this month, we are all making sure we have tea breaks every single day and get out into the sun every afternoon. I send my team a reminder to make sure they have had their tea break.” - Certified Nutritionist Shelly Gawith 

TikTok Dance Challenge

“This is our first-ever celebration of Wellness Month, and we are preparing to do a TikTok dance challenge. Every employee has a chance to join and upload their dance challenge. It’s up to them what dance challenge to choose. They upload their video to their social media accounts, and the employee who gets the most likes/reaction will win special health gift vouchers (gift certificates from Banza and other health stores).” - James Pearson, CEO of eVenturing

Group Journaling

“This month, we plan on group journaling. Every day, each team member should write down at least one positive and one negative they did for their health. A positive activity scores 2 points, while the negative scores -1. The employee with the highest score wins at the end of the month and gets a voucher for online training sessions.” - Amra Beganovich, CEO/Founder of A&E

Searching for more ways to boost employee morale during COVID-19 and beyond? Click here to read 17 ways to boost employee morale that AREN'T just virtual happy hours.