When the calendar turns to May, employees at Bell strap on their walking shoes.
Last year, during the company’s mental-health week, Bell started a walking challenge, says Marie-Josée Boivin, vice-president of human resources.
“So our employees could either join a team or create a team, but for a full month, people were counting their steps and we were encouraging them to go out for a walk, to walk as colleagues and so on. It was a way to say it’s good to keep an active lifestyle, and we also linked it to mental health, because if you’re healthier up here, if you take time to relax at lunch time, at the end of the day and so on, then you have a better lifestyle,” says Boivin.
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The company intends to do something similar next month, following on the success of last year’s challenge, which saw more than 2,000 employees take part. Boivin notes that while there wasn’t much publicity ahead of the challenge last year, it grew in popularity throughout the month of May.
As part of the challenge, the company has an internal website where employees taking part can post about themselves, write comments and compete with one another, says Boivin.
“Like us in HR, we had two teams and, I have to admit, we had a very nice, happy competition going on. I think it brought a lot of the team together. We even had people writing on the wall that they ended up connecting with people they didn’t know through that challenge. So they created walking groups.”
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