A few weeks ago my colleague Hannele Kuitunen and I were discussing how the COVID era has changed the way we work. A year ago when people started to work more intensively from their home offices, many of us (yours truly included) understood quickly that in order to take care of our personal wellbeing we needed to step outside a couple of times a day, get some fresh air, and also try to maintain the good physical health as an office worker by doing exercises and stretches and taking breaks.
”Is it possible to encourage people to work as much as they can while being on the move?”
Well. I know that there are a lot of great examples of people who have been able to maintain this healthy way of leading their daily lives. But based on my rather small sample, many of us have some issues with physical activity (yours truly belongs to this group too). We simply spend too much time still! And that leads us to the idea Hannele and I had: is it possible to encourage people to work as much as they can while being on the move? Indoors or outdoors. In our company, we all work with our computers and have a lot of online meetings. But are there ways to do some part of the work away from the computer? This being ’on the move’ could be anything: walking or running outside, climbing stairs, doing sit-ups, squats or exercising with a stretch band.
Things escalated quickly.
I had a chat with my other colleague Nina Etelävuori and we just decided to go ahead and organise a company-wide experiment to find out if it is possible to actually work on the move, at least a few times a week. In this experiment that quickly turned to a campaign, our Gofore Crew would mark their minutes of working time done ’on the move’ to an app and also tell their colleagues how successful they were in this. Naturally, the app would have a leaderboard and that would automatically lead us to a nice and friendly competition between colleagues. Who gathers the most experiences with working on the move?
This week we will get started with our campaign. With this campaign, we are actually experimenting different ways of working now and in the future. During the campaign, we will share our discoveries on what works and what doesn’t work to our colleagues. When the campaign is over we will also share the insights externally.
You can follow our journey and progress on Gofore’s social media accounts and with the hashtag #workingonthemove.
