We’re excited to bring you the story of a real company that used Pacer for Teams, our organizational step challenge platform, to get their employees moving. We’ll bring you updates from time to time of real companies and Pacers using our Pacer App and Pacer for Teams to get more active!
** This piece was written by Yewdale staff. All of the experiences are their own.
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UK blind manufacturers Yewdale hold a company-wide charity event every year. In August 2018 we decided to set staff the task of walking 15,000 steps each in a single day.
Walking is an activity everyone can do and it also plays a key role in leading a healthy lifestyle. We wanted to create an activity that our whole workforce could be involved in: from our factory teams to our office staff.
To help us visualize our progress we worked out that 15,000 steps each equated to nearly 1.2 million steps company-wide. That many steps translate into 600 miles. If you were to go 600 miles away from our factory and offices you’d end up in Milan in Italy. So Yewdale called its event ‘Walk To Milan.’
A plan was forming. The charity we decided to support was Diabetes UK, who were also running a Million Step Challenge and alerting people to the need for a healthy lifestyle to help tackle the risk of Type 2 diabetes.
The only problem was… how on earth would we track ALL of our steps?
Traditional pedometers are not accurate enough, and trying to gather everyone’s separate data from various devices and health apps on their phones sounded like a lot of work for what was supposed to be a fun event. We needed a way to track everyone’s steps all at once. We wanted to split our staff into teams to generate a competitive edge and we wanted to tally it all up at the end.
Finding Pacer for Teams Enterprise transformed the scope of our challenge. We were able to easily sign up our whole team using their smartphones, get them to join our team and then allocate them to groups. We could track individual step counts as well as team average steps, and everyone could see the scoreboard changing before their eyes.
Pacer for Teams was key for several reasons. First, it was easy to get everyone signed up. Being able to see the real-time leaderboard added a competitive edge that led to groups of people going for hour-long lunchtime walks just to keep their step counts high.
We used the Enterprise Plan features to download the data to process into a real-time leaderboard and displayed it on screens throughout the office and factory. The downloaded data was easy to interpret and gather and made it so easy to ascertain a winning team.
“It’s safe to say without Pacer for Teams our charity walk challenge would not have been as engaging or competitive as it was,” said Marketing Manager Richard. “Excitement started to build in the days building up to the event as people started to figure out which teams looked like favourites, and individuals took pride in the number of steps they did in a day. When the day of the event came around Yewdale was a hive of activity as everyone wanted to meet that 15,000-step target.”
One member of staff walked 44,000 steps on the day and many achieved the 15,000-step target. We raised money for a good cause and walked a collective 1,278,479 steps. This equates to 640 miles, which would actually have put us in Monaco.
‘One of the best-yet-unplanned parts of this challenge was that through Pacer, our staff were able to see the type of lifestyle they lead and whether they’re active or not so active. One member of staff told me they were shocked to see how few steps a day they actually take and are actively working to change that,’ said Richard. ‘That really ties in well with Yewdale’s core value of providing a happy and healthy working environment and lifestyle for our staff.’
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If you haven’t downloaded the Pacer app yet, download Pacer now for free (on mobile)! You can also check out our website (mobile or desktop) or follow our blog for more great walking and healthy lifestyle tips.
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