Sport for Business in partnership with Mason Alexander is highlighting 20 workplaces where sport is not only considered to be important but is delivered in a way that actively encourages participation.

Exercise is recognised as an important contributor towards eliminating anxiety, fostering creativity and increasing productivity.  There is solid evidence that it is also a major factor in talent retention.

Today we dropped in on Jane Barrett, Head of Wellbeing at leading technology company WorkLife, based in Dublin’s Silicon Dock.

SfB: Tell us a little about your company and the profile of your workforce?

JB: We provide app technology that helps employers to help employees keep a smart balance between the time they spend at work and their time in life.  We were established in Boston in 2015 and opened up our European office in Dublin in mid-2018.

We now have 600 employees on-site and will see that double over the next three years. Our workforce is young, with an average age of 25 and with wellbeing at the centre of our business it’s only right it should be at the heart of the way we work ourselves.

What part does physical movement play in how you apply that philosophy?

We may be fortunate in that we can pick from programmes that have been tried and tested in Boston and at our other main office campus in Chicago.

When we moved into our offices we were able to design the space to suit our own needs.  Flexibility is the key to one of our most popular offerings in movement, that of a daily yoga session.

It takes place at 8 AM but is in no way obligatory.  We started out at 9 but the feedback was that people preferred to get it in as part of their preparation for the day ahead.  By nine, even though a fair proportion of our contact is with the US, the elements of the day were beginning to get into people’s heads.  

This is a 26-minute session, the number is based on numerology, and people then have a time to get water or coffee or have a shower before being ready to go.

At one point we had to give over three spaces and run the session concurrently to 180 people.  In the summer that dipped to two but it is incredibly popular.

Was it not a challenge asking people to do it on their own time?

Not at all, it was at the request of our people, based on that timing and mentally getting in the zone for work.

We don’t apply a clock to the working day.  Teams of people know what they have to do and they become self-motivating.  Yoga is the most popular initiative but it is completely on them whether they want to take part every day, once a week or not at all.

Do you offer any incentives for active transport getting to and from work?

The best is that we do not offer car parking space to staff.  For some that is a turn-off but where we are located is great for public transport and a large number of staff, just over 60 per cent are living within 4 kilometres of the office.

We have turned the car park spaces that came with the office rental into a secure bike park and over 200 staff are registered to use that.

Others walk or run and we have 10 shower units for each of our male and female staff to use if they have been active in getting to work.

Do you have sports teams and do you encourage them?

There is a running club of around 30 who regularly run up and down the quays at lunchtime.  They performed well in the Grant Thornton Race last year, fining seventh and 24th overall and we had ten teams entered in the PwC Staff relay race which was great fun as well.

We also have two teams that play Tag rugby at a couple of Festivals and we have more informal five a side soccer teams.

Any group that registers with us in the HR team will be given a grant of €1,000 a year to spend on facilities or kit, whatever way they want, and that works so long as they have ten members of staff signed up.

The latest of those is a Jugger crew who take part down in Ringsend three lunchtimes a week.

I had to look up what Jugger was but now I’m one of the ten that does it.

Are there any fitness or wellbeing programmes that you have available to staff?

As part of our corporate health plan, we have a quarterly session where staff can measure their vMax and other stats, on-site but with the data personal to them.

We get an aggregated and anonymised report so we can make a call on overall health and fitness but again it’s purely down to the staff if they want to take that opportunity to get to understand their health that little bit better.

We signed a deal with Fitbit early in 2019 and as part of that, we got a tracker for every member of staff across the US and Dublin, 2,800 of them in total which on the street would have a value of almost €3 million.

That’s a measure of how much we are willing to commit to our people.  They do have to give them up though if they are leaving the company, apart from those going on maternity or parental leave.

Check out our earlier interviews in this series with Bank of Ireland, Vodafone, eBay, Workday, Legacy Consultants, PwC and Lidl.
Next up over the coming days: Three, Aviva, AIB, Irish Life, Vhi, Teneo, Accenture, RTÉ, Sky Sports, Off The Ball, Aldi, and Aer Lingus.