As company grows, approach to wellness does too

July 18, 2018

This paid piece is sponsored by MetaBank.

71,296 miles. That’s how many miles employees at MetaBank walked, ran, swam or biked during the company’s Step Into Spring event sponsored by employee resource group METAbolism. With goals of healthy living and work, and creating a fun, positive environment for wellness, METAbolism is one of the oldest employee groups at Meta.

As Meta has grown from a startup to a billion-dollar, national business, METAbolism had to grow and change too.

“It was a different program when we were just the payments division located in Sioux Falls,” said METAbolism committee member Tricia Smit. “We were challenged as a committee to figure out ways to include employees located outside of our corporate office. That’s when we started doing challenges that could be conducted virtually and relying on people to track or enter their results.” Making sure that team members from across the company could be involved was important to the committee as MetaBank embraced a culture change from local to national.

This year’s Step Into Spring challenge encouraged teams to “walk” the historical Route 66. Category winners had the opportunity to win gift cards based on different milestones. Participation this year was at an all-time high with 38 teams made up of 284 participants from every division.

“This is the ninth year we’ve done a Step Into Spring challenge,” Smit said. “As Meta has grown, participation has grown too. We wanted to show that you can have wellness challenges that engage employees and keep it interesting year after year.”

The statistics are impressive. The Large Team winners (6-10 person team) logged 3,871 miles during the challenge. The Small Team winners (1-5 person team) logged 1,898 miles.

And the wellness challenges didn’t stop there. After Step Into Spring, the METAbolism group launched into Maintain Don’t Gain. The goal of the 12-week program is to encourage employees to maintain their weight.

“We want to make wellness a part of employees’ everyday lives – at work and at home,” Smit said. “These challenges are a fun way to bring employees together. Often, they team up across different departments. It becomes about camaraderie and building relationships, all while they’re working on improving their health.”

METAbolism also runs a Biggest Loser competition. This year’s launched Jan. 10 and ran through March 7. Singles and Doubles categories were offered. Sixty-six employees from all divisions participated with a combined weight loss of 736.3 pounds.

“People get pretty excited when the competition is announced,” Smit said. “It becomes a year-over-year competition for people to beat each other but also reach new personal goals. We have rules in place to help people lose weight safely along with different weekly challenges to keep it interesting. Even employees that didn’t participate join the presentation at the end to see who won and the total amounts lost. It’s become a tradition here at Meta.”

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As company grows, approach to wellness does too

With goals of healthy living and work, and creating a fun, positive environment for wellness, METAbolism is one of the oldest employee groups at Meta.

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