The conversation surrounding creating and maintaining company culture and identity in a remote setting has only been amplified since COVID. How does a company go about this when there isn't a watercooler where employees can huddle around to chit-chat or start an impromptu face-to-face conversation with a work buddy by simply walking over to their desk?

At ConnectCPA, our Head of Advisory, David, started an initiative in 2020 called ‘Jump4June’. The premise of Jump4June is to encourage team members to get outside and enjoy the warmer weather, while getting some much-needed vitamin D after being stuck inside for the winter.

Team members were broken down into groups and had to keep track of their activities.

To make things competitive, five things were implemented:

Weekly resets: Each week was a competition in and of itself. If a team was out of it a couple of days into the week, there was always the next week as that acted as a reset button.
Amazon gift cards: Who doesn't love the sound of an Amazon gift card being dropped in your inbox? Each member of the winning team received an electronic piece of gold at the end of each week.
Slack channels: Team Slack channels were created so team members could encourage each other throughout the week to get out and log some kilometres. A centralized Slack channel was set up in which daily updates were announced as to how each team was performing.
Data collection: A Google Form was set up so every participant could easily enter activities whether it be running, walking or cycling. We recommended using a free activity tracker like ‘Strava’ for those who didn't have an app already. An app like Strava was necessary as the winning team was audited (as a tax firm naturally does) to ensure their kilometres were legitimate at the end of every week.
Data presentation: Our internal and client-facing dashboarding tool was used to visualize the data from the data inputted into the Google Form (and stored in a Google Sheet). Teams would get daily updates about how they were doing individually in the private Slack channels, but also in the centralized channel to see how they were stacking up against the other teams as the week went on. Since there was a different amount of members on each team, the weekly team average instead of the team total was used.

There were also prizes for the best photo each week as individuals explored their local outdoors. It was great to see so many different shots from all across Canada and beyond as we saw team members canoeing in the Okanagan, hiking on The Rock, and our team in the Philippines exploring their neck of the woods.

Sarah (Onboarding Admin) and her dog for a bike ride in Guelph, Ontario

The camaraderie we saw at the company over the four weeks of Jump4June was incredible. Teams were not only cheering on their fellow team members but also laying down intricate strategies on what needed to be done to overtake ‘Team Red’ or the always competitive ‘Team Yellow’.

Leaderboard after final week of competition

In total, the company logged 1005 individual activities and travelled 4,214km by 46 different team members.

With the early season heat wave in many parts of the country, the initiative may have to be pushed a month earlier next time around. March4May anyone?