EM PLOYEES AND WORKING E NV IRONM E NT
The whole of IVL had fun on our walk from Stockholm to Beijing The pandemic of 2020 required ingenuity in many areas, not least regarding the lack of contact and physical activity when working from home. The activity challenge during the autumn livened things up.
2020 has been a unique year, including at IVL. When the pandemic struck, most of our employees were asked to work from home. It is not possible for all our work to be done from home, however, as IVL’s laboratory activities mean that we have to keep our offices open. During the spring and summer, the feeling was that working from home was working relatively well – it was a bit of a novelty. After the summer, when it became clear that we had a long, dark autumn of working from home ahead of us, IVL carried out a survey to see how working from home was going. The results were relatively positive, but showed that 41 percent of our employees tended to move about less when working from home, and that many were missing contact and interaction with their colleagues. As a result, HR and our two sports associations began to think about what we could do to increase physical activity. We decided to conduct a classic step competition – but with a twist. We launched a competition with approximately ten people per team, with the goal being for each person to achieve 10,000 steps per day. If everyone succeeded in walking that far, the team would reach Beijing during the 42 days the activity was in progress. We also wanted to integrate social activities to create a sense of togetherness and to increase knowledge about our various offices, projects and colleagues. As a result, we launched the ‘Stockholm to Beijing’ activity challenge, in which we would walk from our office on Valhallavägen in Stockholm to our office in Beijing via all our other offices.
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We included various tasks and activities during the journey, and showed a film from each office so that everyone could see what they look like. Various projects were also presented along the way. Every week there were challenges that provided additional steps. These challenges were both physical, such as taking a morning or lunchtime walk, as well as of a social nature, such as having a Teams coffee with a colleague. We also incorporated activities where the individual would present their results on the intranet’s Yammer function, such as photographing a work of art during a walk. These activities produced an incredible level of commitment, comments and likes, and we have never had so many visitors to Yammer as we had during the activity challenge. Every week we released a ‘TV show’ on the intranet, IVLSporten, during which we awarded prizes, commented on performances and showed funny films and sketches. This was a greatly appreciated feature that really lifted the whole activity. By way of conclusion, we awarded prizes to the first three teams to arrive at the destination. Stockholm to Beijing meant that we had an activity to come together on and actually receive input from colleagues we don’t tend to talk to when we are sitting at home. The activity was much appreciated, with up to around 75 percent of our employees participating. A new survey at the end of the activity showed that more people had become more physically active, which is really good to know considering our dark and rainy autumn!
IVL SWEDISH ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE
