The Amazing Race – teamwork for charity
From Athens to Stockholm, it’s quite a walk. So who manages to complete it first?
In times when working from home is the new standard, we all need to find new ways to get together – and incitements to get up off from our home office chairs. That’s why we recently kicked off the Amazing Race SyVe. The race combines teamwork, physical activity, a competitive element – and, as an added bonus, the winning team gets 2000 Euro to donate to a charity organization of their choice.
But who does win? Easy – the first team that walks from Athens to Stockholm via all our offices in Sarajevo, Warsaw, Bonn, Frankfurt, Malmö, Helsingborg, Gothenburg and finally Stockholm. And when we say “walk”, we mean literally speaking! This is a step count competition, and the first team to reach the number of steps that corresponds to the stroll between Greece and Sweden can start chanting ‘We Are The Champions’. And it’s not just about walking. All physical activity counts, regardless if the participants lift weights, join a spinning session or play padel. To log their steps – or activity – the contestants use an app called Wellstep, which registers the steps and add them to the team tally.
Julia Abelsson is the organizer of this project – or, if you like, part of competition management.
“These days, it’s important to be creative when it comes to activities for the company. Two of our consultants, Eva Nyström and Peder Gustafsson from the Stockholm office, had a great idea at one of our engagement meetings, aka The Breakfast Club: we should arrange a walking contest. We put our heads together and turned the idea into an international project for all regions.
We invited the entire company, and about half of our people joined the Amazing Race. It looked like we had come up with an attractive concept! To get started, we divided participants into teams of ten. We mix people from different regions so they get to team up with colleagues they usually don’t meet that often at all.
Julia Abelsson, Team Lead Recruitment at System Verification Stockholm
The competition format naturally encourages people to get active. You can see how everyone’s doing, live in the Wellstep app. You feel much more triggered to go for a walk if you, for example, notice that your boss is 2000 steps ahead of you right now. And as the winners also get money to donate to charity, you could say the purpose of this activity is threefold: It’s about teambuilding, wellness and social responsibility,” says Julia.
The Amazing Race ends on 29 April. But it looks like we can crown a winner petty soon. One of the teams is soon in Gothenburg – they have walked over 5 000 000 steps.
Right now, System Verification have walked 71% of a full lap around the world.
So, as they say: to be continued.
