Why Appirio issued Jawbone fitness monitors to employees

CITE World

There are plenty of consumer tools that jump to mind as useful for boosting productivity at work. Smartphones, tablets, and apps like Evernote and DropBox.

How about fitness monitors? Appirio thinks so.

It has issued Jawbone UP monitors to 200 employees as part of an internal fitness and wellness program and said that benefits include increased productivity and employee satisfaction as well as the more tangible insurance savings.

Appirio is working with Jawbone on new features that will let it aggregate user data as well as tie corporate information into the Jawbone dashboard. In about a month it expects to have completed integration that will feed Jawbone data into Salesforce and Chatter, also.

The roots of the initiative go back to the very start of the company.

“We’ve always had an athletic and competitive culture,” said Chris Barbin, co-founder and CEO of Appirio, a seven-year-old business with around 700 employees who help enterprises migrate to public cloud services. From the start, the company would coordinate activities like working toward marathons.

Earlier this year, however, the company decided to formalize its fitness activities into a new program. Dubbed CloudFit, it includes offering employees Jawbone UP fitness monitors and hiring a “virtual trainer” who uses Chatter to set workouts, offer advice on nutrition and offer encouragement...

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