The first of its kind at the company and the commitment of almost half of the employees to participate in the fun!

Company:

Coface Poland

Description:

Poland's only financial institution offering comprehensive receivables management services such as receivables insurance, factoring, business information and B2B debt collection.

  • Branch
    Insurance, finance
  • Number of Employees
    230
  • Office
    Warsaw

Goal

To achieve the CSR goal by integrating employees, motivating movement and raising money for a charitable foundation

93

employees

18 906

kilometers by bike

11 599

kilometers of running

4 349

activities

2

months of competition

7 627,7

kg of CO2 saved

15 000 pln

for charity

Summary

In 2020 we participated in the Activy challenge for the first time. The organization of the event was related to changes in our company. We have been supporting charitable organizations for years, but now we are trying to enrich our CSR activities. We are taking more and more pro-environmental and pro-health initiatives, supporting local entrepreneurs, and we are also planning young athletes. The Activy program has fit perfectly with our needs. Thanks to it, we were able to motivate employees to move and at the same time raise PLN 15,000 for a charity foundation!

Challenge purpose

The slogan for the “W Coface pomagamy – kilometry przemierzamy”program was athletic and recreational. We wanted to motivate as many employees as possible to participate in the fun, encouraging movement after months of home office work and promoting a healthy lifestyle. We have quite a few amateur athletes in the company. However, we didn't want to focus only on them. We wanted people who prefer a "couch potato" lifestyle to take part in the campaign as well. That's why it suited us very much to have a choice of different activities, from walking to marching, running to biking or rollerblading. The minimum distance of 1.5 kilometers also acted as a motivator for less skilled participants. Thanks to extensive communication and a charitable goal that further encouraged employees to participate in the challenge, our objectives were met. Almost half of the employees got in on the action, and the competition continued until the final moments. First place in the women's ranking was decided by a 1.6 km run completed a few minutes before midnight on the last day of the competition!

Before the start

We planned the campaign for two months. Prior to the competition, we carefully prepared the program's communication, and our work was reflected in the involvement of employees and their increased motivation to participate in the challenge. Due to the pandemic and the reduction of work in the office, we focused on sending emails and communicating on the intranet. Through them, we informed participants about the details of the program, the rules and its progress. The communication was definitely helped by emails and graphics prepared by Activy. We sent messages to employees twice a week, every Monday and Thursday. To further motivate participants, we prepared special graphics with maps - first of Europe and then of the world, on which we showed the route and the increasingly distant countries we managed to visit by covering more kilometers.

Solution icon

During the challenge

The employees got into the challenge right from the start. This was definitely influenced by the charitable goal. Initially, we wanted to donate PLN 10,000 to a charitable foundation. However, employees got so involved in the fun that they reached the goal after just one month of competition. So we decided to add another PLN 5,000. Employees loved the fact that they didn't have to cover dozens of kilometers during the week to be high in the competition standings. More important than the number of kilometers covered was the regularity of the activities performed.

"I am very sorry that the challenge is already over. During the campaign I motivated myself to go out at least for a short walk every day. It made me feel definitely better. Now that the challenge is over and I've been crushed by responsibilities at work, I don't walk as often. But I'm trying, and hopefully soon I'll be back to the regularity that the Activy challenge taught me."
"Participating in the challenge made me feel better about my daily life. I really enjoyed the camaraderie within the team, as well as the sports competition with my colleagues, whom I don't see on a daily basis due to the pandemic. Thanks to the app, I was also able to follow their activities, which gave me a substitute for contacts, now so limited."

Results

In the challenge, employees could compete against each other individually and in teams, and in both classifications the competition was fierce. To win, teams adopted different strategies. The athletes of some teams, in order to cover more kilometers and earn more points, performed activities only within their "specialty." They played the sport they felt confident in. In other teams, each employee cycled and ran in order to receive more points for performing activities regularly - thanks to streak bonuses. Fierce competition and mutual motivation by the participants resulted in covering almost 3/4 of the length of the equator in the 2-month challenge. The reward for all participants was the great satisfaction of earning funds for a worthy cause and improving fitness at the same time. The group of winners of each category had the privilege of choosing the foundation for which we donated, and each medalist additionally received a voucher for purchases in a sports store.