Get your office moving with a fitness dashboard

Spring has come to Ottawa and it's an especially happy time for all of the runners and cyclists in the office. A lot of us walk or cycle to and from work, and we have a variety of clubs and groups focused on different activities: run club goes for runs at lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and there’s a group that does “Yoga on the hill” (Parliament Hill, that is) on Wednesdays. Some of us just cycled the CN Ride for CHEO, and a lot of us are signed up for the CHEO 5K Run in June. We also have a soccer team that plays Tuesday nights. Seems like a pretty active office right?

What’s great about our group is that, though a lot of us are at different fitness levels, and we all have individual exercise preferences and goals, we also enjoy exercising and achieving fitness objectives as a group. We set goals like: “everyone in this group is going to run the CHEO 5K in June without walking”, and we put together an exercise plan to achieve that goal. Setting milestones is an important part of the process. For example, on week one our objective was to run 1 minute, then walk 1 minute, for 30 minutes. On week two we set out to double our running time between walks...And so our plan has continued, with our goal to have the whole group running together for 5 km by the end of May. The experienced runners in the group are motivated to coach and support the novice runners. The novice runners are motivated to become better runners, and to keep up with the group. It truly becomes a team goal, and a team win when we make progress.

Of course, at Klipfolio, we’re united by our love of data, and of metrics, and of data tracking tools (aren’t all offices? ;) So there was never any question that run tracking tools and dashboards were going to be part of this process. And they have been a great part of the process.

We built a group running dashboard with data from MapMyFitness, Under Armour’s Running App. One of us in the group runs with an iPhone in hand, with the app tracking our time and splits as we go. When we get back to the office, our run data displays on our shared dashboard, and we can bask in our achievement for the day, and see our progress week to week. Reporting our group stats at the end of each run has become a reward and a ritual. We don’t want to see any regressions in performance on the dashboard. We don’t want to see a bad result. We like to see gold stars and positive sloping lines on the dashboard. Nerdy? Maybe. Effective? Yes, definitely.

So if you’re motivated to motivate your team, and to get your office moving, I highly recommend an approach that includes goal setting, and performance tracking. If you’re interested in our dashboard and the MapMyFitness dashboard integration we’re using, I’ve created a quick video tutorial on how to connect below.

You can start with a free trial, but if you’re looking for a bit of change to fund the purchase of the dashboard, here are the bullet points for your HR team:

“Dear HR, I would like to help:

• Promote an office culture of health and fitness
• Improve teamwork
• Increase productivity
• Increase retention”

Whether you go the dashboard route or not, group exercise is a great way to get your team going this Spring, so get out there!

Here’s the demo:

And here’s a concept for a group training dashboard: