A fun health program at Zerodha
We are running a fun health program at Zerodha. Anyone on our team with BMI <25 gets half a month’s salary as bonus. The avg BMI of our team is 25.3 & if we can get to <24 by Aug, everyone gets another ½ month as a bonus. It’d be fun to compete with other companies 😁
The lowest average BMI or the largest change in average BMI wins. The winner chooses a charity everyone else contributes to. Maybe a health tech company can run the initiative. If you want to do this at your company, do post in the comments. Happy world health day!
PS: I know BMI isn’t the best measure to track health & fitness, but it is the easiest way to get started. With health & most other things in life, the most important bit is to get started. Btw, walking 10,000 steps daily is a great start if you’ve been wanting to get healthy.
Context
Sharing more context. We have experimented with a bunch of ideas since Covid & WFH to help the team think about their health. Sitting is the new smoking, & the idea has been to nudge everyone to move. Killing all work chats post 6pm & weekends have probably had the best ROI.
Last year we let everyone on the team set health goals & ran a lottery amongst those who met their goals for Rs 10lks. Was successful, but the participation wasn’t broad-based. We ran online yoga sessions & made mental health counselors available for the team during lockdowns.
The average age of the team has gone up to 30 (we haven’t really been hiring), and the health levels have dipped in the past 2 years due to WFH and the pandemic stress. So as a company, the onus is to do whatever to nudge everyone on the team to think about their health.
The plan has been to get everyone to a diagnostic center once a year to track health, but has been a challenge given WFH & most on our team aren’t in Metros. Instead of procrastinating, we thought a good way is to get started with something.
And this is just an added bonus over and above all other bonuses & incentives that everyone on the team earns. Just like that Rs 10lk prize pool for the lottery we ran last year to pick one person amongst everyone who met their health goals.