Ranking co-workers on "wellness" leaderboards is dumb.
Your first office steps challenge is a hilarious winner-takes-all affair. Fred and Jim, the marathoners in Sales, battle it out, crushing everyone else — except Sue in Ops, who happens to be hiking in the Himalayas. (True story.) The challenge is the talk of the all-hands meeting for weeks. By year three, though, people are over being crushed. Eye-roll emojis are exchanged on Slack, and your wellness program is on life support.
It's surprising how many companies throw themselves into leaderboard-driven wellness challenges and run headfirst into the Fred-and-Jim problem. Yes, competition is a powerful motivator, but surely the goal here is not to watch the same elite athletes among your employees repeatedly achieve victory über alles while applying an unpleasant rank order to everyone else. The mission is to nudge the whole group toward healthier living while generating a fun sense of "we're all in it together" over time. The typical leaderboard challenge often ends up feeling silly at best, and judge-y at worst.
Count.It has been wrestling with this knot for years, and we've come a long way from our original static leaderboard.
Our first move was to scrap that leaderboard in favor of an interactive path with a shared goal line. A leaderboard challenge without a goal is like a running race without a finish line — not the brightest idea. With a clear goal, everyone can achieve personal victory while participating in a common experience. As is the case in any real-world event, (think: 10K race or marathon), one person finishing doesn't stop anyone else from finishing, or celebrating!
Over the years, we've added a lot more features: a challenge newsfeed, an extending goal zone, deep support for teams, better fitness app integrations, the cute pacer bunny, and more.
Even with all that, however, we still had a problem.
Our challenges ask participants to cross a goal line within a set timeframe — a week, a month, etc. But asking someone to log 10,000 steps a day is fundamentally different from asking them to log 70,000 steps in a week. The first requires showing up repeatedly. The second can be gamed with a few big days, followed by a lot of couch time.
The issue becomes more obvious when you consider other types of goals. One client wanted to run an "Intro to Mindfulness" challenge: Meditate 10 minutes a day for a week. The admin planned to post a new video each day for participants to follow along. Beautiful idea — except our challenge path only tracked total minutes for the full week. There was no way to see the daily-ness of progress, and nothing to stop a participant from binge-meditating on day one, and "completing" the challenge before the week had really begun. Worse, overachievers might seem to "crush" everyone at mindfulness. Not exactly the vibe we were seeking.
The solution was obvious: streaks. That is, show participants the growing chain of their daily activity. People are obsessive about streaks, and will do almost anything to protect them. Duolingo, anyone? But Count.It is a social app — individual streaks in isolation miss the point entirely. We needed "social streaks," i.e. streaks that lived inside the group experience. Inconveniently, nothing like that existed.
So we invented it.
In April, we launched our Consistency view.
Here's how it works: participants climb a ladder based not simply on how much they've done, but on how many times they've hit their daily or weekly goal. Each rung shows another day — or week — completed, and all the challengers who have made it that far. Destroy your step goal on Monday, and lounge the rest of the week? Your progress stalls. Show up every single day, even barely clearing the bar? You climb. Cranking out extra steps earns total points, but it doesn't buy you consistency. Those are two different kinds of achievement, and now we measure both.
Consistency doesn't replace our existing total-points view — they complement each other. In the same challenge, you might reward your most active participant based on total points and separately reward everyone who hit the goal every single day.
It was a long time coming, and we're very excited to release Consistency. The first problem, of course, is to let the world know the feature exists. So, our message to challenge admins everywhere: Don't build a challenge that only a Sales bro can love! (Much as we love Sales bros!)
A healthy community is not about numbered rankings. It's about shared achievement and getting as many people across the goal line as possible. With Consistency and Total Points, our challenges now have TWO goal lines. That's two chances to succeed, and fewer eye-roll emojis on Slack.