A great new app by Virgin HealthMiles, of Richard Branon’s Virgin Group, is taking seriously the responsibility companies have for the health of their employees. Based around the idea of providing wellness activities and mobile incentives for its users, this app has an accelerometer that tracks steps and workout calories and then syncs the info to the users’ Virgin HealthMiles account. The Dash app allows users to manually add weight, blood pressure activity, and duration while the BMI numbers and biometric information is automatically calculated. Going forth, employees can keep track of their workouts and caloric burns and even have access to summaries and graphs which correlate their weekly and monthly progress.
Apps and tools like this which incentivize positive employee behavior and performance are becoming more of priority for employers looking to create a stable and productive work force. Many leadership training seminars now focus on community health objectives just as consistently as communication skills and technology integration.
While the Virgin HealthMiles Dash app is not the first mobile exercise application that keeps track of calories and progress, it is one of the first that is uniquely tailored to employees as an incentivizing factor for their work forces. Perhaps one of the neatest tools on the app is the Challenges feature, which facilitates and encourages team challenges with real-time stat tracking. This is all part of the Virgin HealthMiles Connections social platform, which creates a community-based news feed.
Dash is also one of the first activity tracking apps that has a well-planned reward platform based around the health of the participants and not the micro-managing delight of the community manager. One of perks of this for the employees is that he or she does not need to be a part of the rewards platform in order to participate. Let the employee accelerometer challenges begin!
Article contributed by Jenna Smith