Jotform employees complete 30-day company fitness challenge

Jotform employees complete 30-day company fitness challenge

Gym closures around the world have made it harder than ever to get a proper workout.

But a fit team equals a happy and productive team. And that’s why employees at Jotform recently embarked on a 30-day fitness challenge to stay on top of our game.

Our goal was to do as many pushups, sit-ups, squats, burpees, minutes of plank, and miles walked or jogged as possible. The workouts were simple to understand, but relatively difficult and eclectic. If you did them all, you’d feel it in your legs, back, arms, and core.

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Mercan with flawless squat execution from her home in Ankara, Turkey.
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İpek holding a straight-arm plank from her yard in Ankara, Turkey. 

In total, 46 JotFormers logged at least one workout, for a total of 504 workouts.

This added up to

  • 15,323 pushups
  • 22,062 sit-ups
  • 25,443 squats
  • 3,876 burpees
  • 942.52 minutes of plank
  • 959.86 miles walked/jogged
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Patrick logged the most miles walked of anyone on the team. He usually finds a good trail close to his home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The process

Early on, I realized we not only needed a good system for tallying workouts, but one that made it simple for employees to record workouts immediately after doing them. 

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Kubra showed off her flexibility in a home workout in Ankara, Turkey.

Basically, we needed forms.

I started with a simple form to collect participants who wanted to take part in the challenge. I sent a company-wide email with the form, and the responses funneled into the form so that I didn’t have to review a ton of emails to see who was interested. But the primary form for this challenge was a form to log all the workouts.

The workout log form could only be as effective as it was easy to access. Many employees, myself included, did workouts outside (I would drive my downstairs neighbors crazy if I did them in the apartment). So the form needed to be readily available on everyone’s smartphones.

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Easy access to the workout log form from the Jotform Mobile Forms app meant that people could log a workout as soon as they finished it, wherever they were.

Jotform Mobile Forms solved this problem. The first step was adding all of the participants to a dropdown list field in the workout log. That made the process of recording workouts faster and simpler. Then I used the Assign Forms feature to assign the workout log to each participant. This means the form was handy in their app whenever they opened it. And filling it out actually took less than a minute.

I also synced the form with Google Sheets. This made it easier to track progress and get a quick view of all of the submissions. Whenever someone submitted the form, they saw the Google Sheets link on the thank-you page so they could view it themselves.

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Kiran knocking out some pushups from his home in Visakhapatnam, India. He logged 25 workouts over the course of the challenge.

Outcomes

After the first day, we were off to the races. Predictably, the first couple of days had the highest level of participation — similar to how people flock to the gyms in January to kick off the new year. But even over the duration of the month, several employees stayed the course. A few JotFormers even logged workouts all 30 days.

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When Sezin has her headphones on, she means business.
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Alptug with a plank so flat you could rest your coffee on him. 

One thing I didn’t account for was each participant’s workout preferences. Just about every JotFormer had a clear favorite workout. Some really logged the miles, while others really focused on squats, pushups, or sit-ups. We’d originally set group goals for each individual exercise, but that was hard to achieve when people showed a strong inclination toward some exercises and not others.

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Bored with how the workouts were going, Annabel added water jug weights to make the exercises more challenging. 

Conclusion

These are hard times. But we were able to do a healthy challenge for our team that engaged Jotform employees from several different countries around the world. It wasn’t a way I ever envisioned actually using Jotform, but it was fun, collaborative, and made us one of the fittest SaaS companies on the planet.

Have you and your company been keeping active during COVID-19? Any tips to share? Let us know in the comments below.

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I view sit-ups as a sort of evil that I hope I don’t have to confront again in my lifetime. This was from a park near my home in Oakland, California.
AUTHOR
Chad is a former VP of Marketing and Communications at Jotform. He’s also a frequent contributor to various tech and business publications, and an absolute wizard with a Vitamix. He holds a master’s degree in communication and resides with his wife and cats in Oakland, California.

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