IT Wellbeing–The Wellness Beat Goes On
A priority for IT Chief Information Officer Raymond Lefebvre since joining UMass Boston has always been the wellbeing of IT staff. In the spring of 2022 Lefebvre introduced a fitness, nutrition, and mindfulness platform called Wellbeats to all IT employees geared towards improving everyone’s wellbeing. The platform contains numerous instructional and informational videos for IT staff to enhance their physical and mental wellbeing both at home and at work. However, this past spring, IT decided to take its Wellbeing program another step forward (pun intended) with the first annual Step into Spring challenge. At the IT Spring Social in March 2023, pedometers were handed out to everyone who wanted to participate in the fitness challenge and starting March 27th, 2023, the race (or more accurately, step counting) was underway.
What perhaps made the two-week competition most fun for the participants was being able to follow their progress on a new Wellbeing channel that was added to the “One IT” Microsoft Teams site. At the end of each day our Spring Steppers would use the “Tracker” option in the Wellbeing channel to post their numbers, and the Tracker would add the day’s totals into a leaderboard which was updated daily. Assistant Vice Chancellor of Client Services John Mazzarella moderated the leaderboard, and his daily reports upped the fun factor for everyone involved. He even kept a running total of everyone’s steps each day and described the distance covered, such as after day one 64 miles had been travelled, the distance from UMass Boston to Barnstable on Cape Cod!
The enthusiasm for the Step into Spring event was obvious when viewing each day’s leaderboard, as participants and even nonparticipants offered lively commentary and cheered themselves or others on. There was even some suspense as positions on the leaderboard shuffled around each day, especially as the April 9th finish drew near. In the end no one could catch the indomitable Rocky Haggard, though 2nd and 3rd place finishers Yueqing Chen and Eric Berry came close and pushed Rocky to go as hard as he could. Most importantly, 33 people participated in the two-week event, walking the equivalent of 4.7 million steps or 2,225 miles, which is the distance from Boston to Albuquerque, New Mexico!
Prizes were awarded to the top three finishers, but really every participant was rewarded by knowing that they had made themselves more physically fit and had fun doing so. And, in the end, the IT Wellbeing program advanced its goal of creating a happier and healthier IT team.