COMPANY AS A TEAM

We care about our team. We care about each and every one of us. That is why we try to organise both small and large sports and social events to strengthen our bonds, to pull together and to get to know each other better.

The first lockdown of 2019 has put a stop to these activities. Virtually overnight, we found ourselves confined in our homes without the usual opportunities for personal interaction that is so important to us. Some of us were able to cope with the situation without issues, others had it worse. What we really missed were the popular challenges.

We tried to find a method for collaborating and interacting with the team remotely. A way to connect despite the lockdown and, if possible, to offer something fun and meaningful to do. After all, life is not solely about work.

We enjoy our work, but also sporting challenges. We love to compete! We have tested various communication platforms and tried to encourage group activities. It did not really work for us.

We decided to create a mobile application. A simple one that would be accessible to all members of our team.

It was crucial to us that everyone had the opportunity to participate in challenges that they enjoyed. It was equally important that everyone could create their own challenges and invite other colleagues to participate.

We got down to business.

We love sport. Sporting activities were therefore clearly the most important. We also love good food and food-related challenges are a lot of fun! We also like to relax. We like to read, listen to music, watch soap operas, or pursue our hobbies.

And all the things we like to do were the basis for our app. Our objective was to include everything we enjoy on the application. But we wanted no work-related activities there. No assignments, no calendar. Nevertheless, it is an application designed for a company, so some information would be useful. We added “company announcements” to the content, sharing important information, such as what is available and how to use the offices during the Covid lockdown.

We started prototyping and testing. The concept rapidly evolved into a tangible product. We kept testing.
We showed the demo to other people to make sure that this idea was interesting to them too, not just to us. And they confirmed that we were on the right track.

We named the application Company as a Team and successfully launched it in our company. From September to December 2019, we collectively managed the following in the application:

• 57 challenges completed
• over 10,000,000 steps walked
• over 800 km run
• 1,900 km cycled
• over 24.5 kg of vegetables eaten
• 5,752 CZK collected for charity projects
• 42 books borrowed

We awarded prizes for the challenges we completed:

• 76 medals
• 16 sports t-shirts

We sampled food made according to 13 recipes.

We ate 3 cakes.

The app has worked wonders for us. We are still improving it. At the moment it does a lot of great things:

• Any user can create a challenge and invite others.
• Anyone can participate in challenges they like.
• Challenges have several options. A team can work together, the results of all participants can be added up. Challenges can be competitive and played for the best result.
• Both individuals and teams can compete.
• Anyone can post or comment on others’ posts within their own social network.
• The app notifies users of new challenges or encourages them to complete ongoing ones.
• Sports results can be imported via Google Fit or Health Fit on iOS.
• Participants earn virtual medals for their results.
• The inspiration section is used to share articles about healthy living.

The list of features does not stop there. We are working on further improvements and have more than enough in the pipeline.

What makes us really happy is that other companies have already shown interest in the application. We are currently in talks with eight companies who are interested in utilising our solution.

The simple idea is evolving into an amazing project.