Spoi­ler alert: no 😊 But they defi­ni­te­ly make up a good basis for it. Have a look how we do it in our orga­niza­ti­on via #Codelab4Fit programme.

It is dif­fi­cult to say when the devo­ti­on for sup­port­ing sports acti­vi­ties in Code­lab star­ted. Sin­ce I remem­ber, we’ve had Mul­ti­sport (not­hing new, ever­y­bo­dy does). Then our social bene­fit fund com­mit­tee deci­ded to sup­port indi­vi­du­als and groups wan­ting to exer­cise. At some point our employees asked us for fun­ding run­ning relay races. When it tur­ned out we had around 30 peo­p­le (around 15% of our employees at that time) wan­ting to give it a go in the race (plus apart from run­ners, the­re was a good deal of bikers, swim­mers and other sports geeks), we deci­ded phy­si­cal acti­vi­ty is worth supporting.

And this is when #Codelab4Fit star­ted. The name was cho­sen by the employees them­sel­ves, via a poll. We all like demo­cra­cy, don’t we? 😊 The rules for the pro­gram­me were very simp­le. We have a given bud­get for fun­ding sports com­pe­ti­ti­on fees for our employees. The only obli­ga­ti­on at their side is to start in our bran­ded tech­ni­cal atti­re and send us some pho­tos after­wards. We also encou­ra­ged to use #Codelab4Fit in social media. In addi­ti­on to this, we made month­ly chal­lenges using one of com­mon­ly used trai­ning plat­forms. That was basi­cal­ly it.

Out­co­me?

My favou­ri­te sto­ry is when one of our employee refu­sed to quit our com­pa­ny becau­se the other didn’t have a sports pro­gram­me 😊 But for all tho­se who say: ‘don’t embarrass yours­elf, that is an anec­do­tal evi­dence’ – have a look at broa­der statistics.

In 2019 we had 56 bene­fi­ci­a­ries of our pro­gram­me. For a two-hundred-sth com­pa­ny of engi­neers that is quite a num­ber, don’t you think? The sta­tis­tics of our chal­lenges said that within a year we burnt 3.006.147 Calo­ries. That is more or less 390 Kg of lost body fat. We did 48.744 Km which means in a coll­ec­ti­ve effort we went around the pla­net at the equa­tor and even star­ted a second turn 😊

We finis­hed 2019 with a good deal of new ide­as for our pro­gram­me and then Covid-19 hap­pen­ed. But loo­king at sta­tis­tics – except for the short peri­od of lock-down pha­se – peo­p­le exer­cise just like they did a year ear­lier, or even more. So it seems that sports works well for their well-being – other­wi­se they would stay home and watch Netflix 😊