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 😊