Companies are quickly learning that the most productive workers are usually pretty healthy and happy as well. A good way to keep employees mentally and physically fit is to provide competitive wellness initiatives. Here, we’ve rounded up three Boston tech companies offering workers everything from running clubs to massages.
Responses from Simon Holroyd, Director
How do you encourage employees to stay healthy?
We do quite a bit of ping pong. Working in a high intensity and highly collaborative environment means we really value breaks. Ping pong is a great way to take breaks. It’s still social but it gets your heart rate up and gets you away from a computer screen. We don’t want people in the mode of checking the web during their breaks and not leaving their desk. We want people to get up and leave their desk and play a game like ping pong or shuffleboard.
Why is it so important to keep employees well?
The motivation for us comes more from wanting to make our engineers productive. We want the team to feel like they are successfully delivering new software products regularly and rapidly. Staying healthy helps us make progress towards efficiency.
Any other cool perks geared toward wellness?
We view the typical day here as part of having a really healthy work-life balance that starts every day with a team breakfast at 8:30 a.m. We get it catered from a variety of different vendors. It serves as a way to make sure everyone has the opportunity to sit together and meet and mingle before breaking into teams and working on clients projects.
We also work on 8-hour billable days so we really do end the day at 6 p.m. That regular rhythm for us serves the workers and provides really great work-life balance and allows us to be really predictable in the way we’re building software.
Response from Whitney Puidokas, Marketing Manager, Content & Community
What are some of your wellness initiatives?
Lose It! offers each employee the option between a gym membership to Wave Health & Fitness (a block away from our Seaport office) or a $90/month expense account that can be utilized on fitness classes, race entries, massages, lift tickets, and more.
Our employees who use the gym benefit can be found working out before, after, and during the work day. Andrea from the marketing team and Pete, our lead Android developer, often lead a small group of us in a lunchtime 5-mile Castle Island run. Will and Raj are the go-to gym rats for anyone looking to bulk up. Taylor and Emma are known for taking our workouts of the week from the app and putting them to the test!
We also have a weekly organic fruit delivery that serves as our office snack station and healthy Monday team lunches to fuel us for the week ahead!
Why do you offer these perks?
Keeping our team healthy and happy are priorities for our company because we want our staff feeling good! The better everyone feels, the more productive they'll be, the fewer sick days they'll need to take, and the more we can accomplish working towards our goal to mobilize the world to achieve a healthy weight.
What impact do these initiatives have on workers?
Lose It! employees have the flexibility to schedule their work day around their favorite spinning class or leave early to get in a run before sunset. We're a team that works hard but also has the freedom to embrace our own definition of healthy.
Responses from Jan Bruce, co-Founder and CEO
Why is health and wellness so important to meQuilibrium?
We’re an organization about encouraging, building, and supporting wellbeing. And we value it highly as an organization. This comes through in small ways and big ways.
It starts with our values. Our goal is to walk the walk with what we do everyday in the office, on the road, and with clients. We aim to be a model of what we help other people strive for.
Our values reflect and encourage how we aim to express ourselves and relate to each other every day; to create and maintain the kind of workplace we want to work in. Our six values are: Positivity, Collaboration, Transparency, Purpose, Passion, and Resilience.
How do those values show through at meQuilibrium?
Yesterday, one of our UX designers sent an email to the company inviting us all to go to the Greenway for lunch, to get outside and enjoy the unusually nice day together. This is actually an activity in our program — it’s what we tell our users to do — and we try to do it, too.
We’re a team of people who make time for exercise because it’s an essential part of managing stress. Folks are supported to workout when it works for them. I like to play tennis early. One of our developers runs most days around 4 p.m. Some go to the gym over lunchtime.
Any other wellness initiatives?
When any new employee starts, they do a “bootcamp” introduction to our product and our science, and they start the program themselves. We want people to connect with the mission and product, no matter what department you sit in. Wellbeing starts from within and connection to work and aligning your work to your values is crucial. This creates purpose and passion, and these are the feelings that grow and catch people — and together create a positive working environment.
Today, we launched a campaign to breakup with your stress —whatever is stressing you out most in your life. Whether that’s procrastinating, not taking enough time to relax, checking your email before bed, perfectionism. We’re doing it with our users. And we did it internally first. Check out some of the pics of our staff. The campaign is about taking back control of your stress. Join the movement and post yours! We are using the hashtag #breakupwithstress
Some responses have been edited for length and clarity. Photos via social media and featured companies.
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