Fit with Futurewhiz

Katariina

The way we live and work fundamentally influences our wellbeing and our overall health. While looking after our mental and physical wellbeing is of course essential in everyday life, its importance has risen during the pandemic. Now that we are mainly working from home, gyms and other sports facilities remain closed, our social visits are limited to friends and family and we’re facing anxiety for a deadly disease, it is more challenging to remain healthy and active.

Continuing to care about health helps us to keep fit in the ‘new normal’.

“At Futurewhiz we recognize that we need to take care of our people, and help them take care of themselves. Taking care of yourself is not selfish, it is important. Self-care should always be your number #1 priority.”

– Nanique Dik, the Head of People

To support our employees balance work with health and wellbeing, we dedicated the full month of March to health by launching “Fit with Futurewhiz”. During this Health Month, we focused on promoting wellbeing as a whole and engaging employees throughout the company to make healthier choices. We chose a way that fits best our culture: by adding the element of fun and turning the month into a team-building competition!

Playfulness, games and competitions are a big part of our company culture. Our employees have often competed against each other either at the office with table tennis or football, or after work with board game evenings or bowling nights. Due to pandemic these activities have turned into online pub quizzes and radio shows, but having fun while competing remained to be the theme.

We partnered with the Health Challenge to create a month-long event for the whole company. With this event we challenged our employees to make healthier choices in everyday life, such as taking stairs instead of an elevator, eating fruit instead of a chocolate bar and taking a moment to relax and slow down in the middle of a busy work day. All employees were divided into teams, which competed with each other by performing health-promoting activities and logging them to the Health Challenge app. Next to completing activities independently throughout the day, employees participated in sessions such as workshops, bootcamps, yoga and meditation practices.

In addition we found a partner in the Happinessbureau, experts in creating happy employees, who organized a workshop on Happy & Healthy at Work. Through assignments, break out sessions and dancing they explained the importance of food, fun, connection, mindset, exercise and relaxing.

We closed the Health Month with the launch of Inuka chat-coaching. Through a short and simple survey employees can test their level of resilience, after which every employee can sign up for several coaching sessions within a year. The sessions are practical and easy accessible for all employees. With this last initiative we continue to highlight the importance of wellbeing going forward.

“All the work we do is built on teamwork, creativity and courage. We can only be this great place to work when we have healthy and happy employees that are able to perform at their best.”

– Serge Bueters, the CEO of Futurewhiz