What Happened After Employees Were Penalised For Using The Elevator

At work, employees are often presented with a choice between taking the stairs and taking an elevator. Choosing the stairs instead of the elevator is a quick way for your employees to add physical activity to their day.

More and more employers are turning to workplace wellness programs to increase morale and productivity while reducing health care costs. Implementing a stairway campaign can be a relatively low-cost way to encourage more physical activity for employees.

While marketing the ‘Take the Stairs’ program is crucial, another important motivator in encouraging people to take the stairs is making stairwells a more inviting place. Human resource department of a small- sized software firm conducted a survey that demonstrated that employees often perceive stairwells as unattractive and/or unsafe. Hence, they took the following measures to make their staircase more attractive and encourage its use among employees.

• Painting and carpeting the staircase.
• Using framed artwork, motivational signs.
• Playing light music has all been proven to help increase use of stairs.
• Adding carpet and rubber treading.
• Using creative lighting.
• Created themed staircase (e.g., transport stair users to a tropical rain forest or a Hawaiian beach during their trip up or down the stairs).
• Creating a catchy rhyme with several lines. Put the first line of the rhyme on the first floor, the second line on the second floor, etc., all the way to the top to finish the entire rhyme.
• Adding footsteps that lead from the elevators to the stairs and have a message spelled out along the way.
• Start at the bottom floor and give each stair a number so that users can easily track their progress.

Further, the wellness department of the organization started penalizing employees for using the elevator in place of stairs. Penalizing included dropping 10 bugs in the donation box every time an employee uses the stairs. Gradually, all the employees drifted towards using the staircase and it showcased amazing results.

• Employees started feeling more energized.
• Through staircase, social interaction developed among employees.
• Employees started burning their additional calories as stair-walking burns six calories per minute compared to less than one calorie per minute when taking the elevator.