We are engineers and designers that spend most of our time sitting in front of our computer. Cool right ? Well yes and no. Spending 8 hours of our life sitting is not a good practice at all. It increases problems with our health. but It’s not only about being sit, it’s about the food we eat.
We are not stoping and checking what we are eating, is it really sustainable to be with that diet ? Drinking coffee ? Consuming tons of sugar ?
Well, at 4Geeks we have stoped and think on that. We are seeing the problems we can face as a company for not being healthy, all of US. We can not have an unhealthy CEO. He has to be 100% for decision making, to lead the company to a better future. And yes it starts from the statement of being healthy, that’s the bottom line for us.
People with an active physical lifestyle and with a good mental health will work their work better, that’s a true fact. The question to this is how can we, as a company, improve it, how can we impulse our people to be in a good shape ? to eat better ?
We have been doing some effort with that. I will like to share with you our movements and the result of them.
Exercise challenges
I remember We started doing push-ups challenges. We do it in monthly basis. People started to feel better, but also most of them never thought they were be able to do 50 push-ups at once. We were doing a minimum physical activity, but, it was gain dues our sedentary past.
We went next to plank. This challenge was really hard since the top of it was to suffer 5 long minutes in plank position. Try it, you will 5 minutes from another perspective, 5 minutes is a long wait.
Everybody started to take consideration about the benefits of doing exercise. We felt better and started to see the changes in our body. Another important note here is that we took 10 minutes from our daily work to do that. So we have to stand, share with our team members, laugh, suffer and then continue working, with a little satisfaction.
We avoid sedentarism those days.
Yoga practice
Starting Yoga is a good point to se how your body is. The flexibly of us was not optimal, the minimum stretch for us was painful and difficult. Our muscles were not in a good shape. We kew that, but we just confirmed it.
We disconnected from tech a little bit and started to feel our body and relax after a good day of work.
We got better every week and started to feel better. We were able to do another moves and to keep position. Unfortunately we had to stop this yoga time due conflicts with schedule. But if you want to add it to your company or to you life it really worth.
Nutrition help
4Geeks pays 50% of a nutritional consult for all of our collaborators. This is the most valuable approach we have done. People are getting better on why eat matters. We are now understanding to take control of our food, not to be controlled by it.
We are trying to do a good effort to change our habits when eating. Again, if people are eating healthy, their brain will work better, that means better decision making, more concentration, more retentive.
We are halfway of the goal. Everyone is doing their best effort.
Our nutrition sessions are like focus groups. We all help to each other to accomplish the goal 🙂
Shared breakfast
It may seem not an approach to help on people’s health, but actually, we in each breakfast someone shares a topic, specially topics to be better, to improve our health specially.
How the habits work. Get rid of stress. Detach from the phone. How motivation works. Those have being some of the topics we have been discussing. It motivates people to re-think how can they get better.
Book Club
Reading for me is where we educate, where we understand things, where our imagination do their job. We started to do book recommendations and everyone at the group had to read it. We found out some really amazing books.
Now, we change it a little bit, everyone reads the book on their convenience on monthly basis, at the end of it, we share our impression. Without spoilers.
We have been creating a nice practice. The habit of reading.
Those are examples of books we had read. We just comment, good and bad thing about the book, everyone at their own peace, and when they have time.
Running team
Alongside with other team members, we decided to register in a running competition. For some of use it was a huge advance, since they were not used to even run. Some of them started to train hard to make the better run they can. It actually, make a good union between the team. Some of them started to train together. This is the start of a sport team, the 4Geeks sport team 🙂
We are thinking on another ways to improve our team’s health. We are happy that we are seeing progress and change in people. As I said we are halfway. Feel free to share another approaches.
About 4Geeks
Founded in 2012, 4Geeks is a global software engineering and revenue growth consulting firm for Fortune 500, Global 2000 and fast-growing SMBs. Provides top solutions to multiple industries including Retail, Healthcare, Banking & Financial Services, B2B SaaS, Manufacturing and Education. HQ in the USA, and delivery centers across Latin America.
