With working from home becoming an established work style amid the coronavirus crisis, some companies are taking steps to ensure their employees stay physically active.
Osaka-based software company Agileware Inc. at the end of last year distributed wrist monitors that calculate calorie exertion to all of its 40 employees, and then began paying an incentive based on the calories they burn.
The employees get paid up to 400 yen a day for exercise that burns 100 kilocalories or more. This means that a total of 8,000 yen will be paid for burning 2,000 kilocalories or more in total for 20 working days in a month.
Agileware prohibits its employees from coming to the office during either a state of emergency or emergency-like priority measures. The crisis-induced, new work style has prompted many of its employees to keep working from home even after such emergency measures are lifted, according to the company.
"Few of our employees had engaged in exercising actively from the beginning, and now they aren't even able to exercise through commuting. So, we had to do something about it," Agileware CEO Mitsuyoshi Kawabata said.
The company reckoned that only encouraging exercise would not do any good, so it decided to provide a monetary incentive. Currently, about 90% of its employees wear the wrist monitor and work out doing yoga, playing badminton, cycling or engaging in any of their favorite sport activities, such as running.
"We will continue this trial for them to stay healthy and keep working for a long time," Kawabata said.
Osaka-based major sporting goods maker Mizuno Corp. held in-house walking events in November last year and May in a competition to record employees' steps using a smartphone pedometer app called aruku&. Participants compete as a group to log how many steps they take each day during a certain period, or try individually to reach their own goals.
About 800 people -- or about half of its employees working in Japan -- participated in the November and May events each, and some said they started exercising more seriously afterward. Mizuno said it wanted to make this a recurring event.
It all started with a questionnaire that Mizuno distributed in June 2020 to its teleworking employees asking about their health conditions. From it, Mizuno received complaints about stiff shoulders and back pain.
Mizuno deemed that the lack of opportunities to exercise could be one of the reasons, and came up with an idea of walking, since it is easy to do. The employees can keep using the app when not competing in the events.
In April, Wedding Park Co., a Tokyo-based wedding information service provider, started awarding its employees points according to the number of steps they take. They count their steps with a pedometer app on their smartphones. The points they amassed can be exchanged for health food or equipment such as balance balls. It was an idea from its new employees hired last April.
The employees can form a team to gain points, which serves as a great opportunity for them to interact with people in departments that they directly do not work with.
"We want to positively solve problems amid the pandemic, such as lack of exercise and communication," company spokesperson Haruki Uchida said.
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
