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 😊