As data-driven fitness company, we spend most of our time measuring other people’s fitness. This time, we decided to measure our own wellness, so we calculated our team’s average Wellness Score. Here’s the full story.

But first, let’s start with some background. Today, monitoring health has become a lifestyle. Whether it is by exercising regularly, tracking physical activity and diet, taking supplements or switching to organic products, this new culture of wellness is the new “norm” (1) (2). Most importantly, consumers want to be in control of their health. Millennials for instance love health and fitness technology. The rise of wearables, food tracking apps, connected scales and smart apparel are all examples of this new culture of wellness. Wearables alone are projected to reach 105 million unit shipments and 3.33 billion U.S. dollars in revenue by 2022. Millennial females alone spend over 200% more time in Sports, Health and Fitness apps than the rest of the population (3). For Millennials, being healthy does not just mean “not sick.” It is a daily pursuit, and self-collected data is a big part of it. 

The Wellness Score: Fitnescity’s new signature wellness test

Fitnescity has recently introduced a new signature assessment called  the Wellness Score. This assessment takes preventative health to a whole new level. It is designed with the goal of helping you become more aware of your own wellness and empowering you to make more informed decisions.

The test is a deep dive into your wellness. It uses an algorithm to score various aspects of your lifestyle, such as your physical activity, sleep, stress, emotional well-being, medical history, nutrition, water and alcohol consumption. The test is based on an extensive (10-15 min) questionnaire and scores all your answers using a proprietary, research-based algorithm. Your answers are scaled from 0 to 100, and each answer has a unique value that is used to calculate your overall score. The good thing is that you can’t really cheat on the test because, unlike other wellness tests or surveys, finding the perfect answer is not that easy. The Wellness Score will ask you to a lot of open-ended questions along with YES/NO’s, opinion scale and multiple choice questions. There are also a few tricky and unpredictable sections.

Once you complete the assessment, the Wellness Score will provide you with three types of results: an overall wellness score, a deep dive into each category and its score (history, physical activity, sleep, stress, emotions, nutrition, water and alcohol consumption), along with feedback and actionable recommendations on each question.

The Wellness Score is available on a waitlist-only basis for anyone who wants to get a comprehensive, data-driven view of their wellness, and recommendations on how to improve.

We were curious about how we were doing, so we calculated our team’s own Wellness Score

At Fitnescity, we are all data enthusiasts, especially when it comes to our fitness. So we were naturally excited about this new assessment. Once we completed it, we spent the next few days discussing each other’s results. At the end, we decided to create a company Wellness Score. This is basically an average that shows our aggregate results, as if we were one single person.

Before we share the results, here’s some background on how we operate:

While we do work hard, we don’t necessarily believe in unsustainable hours and sky-high stress levels that most startup employees seem to be in nowadays. Although our work environment is demanding, we also value regeneration (and exercise!)

For instance, our company gives everyone a complimentary Equinox all-access membership, which they can use anytime during the day if they wish. We also host birthday and family celebrations with officemates (yes, we do eat cake!) and… encourage everyone to take one of our various fitness tests.

We basically think of employees (and clients) as athletes; we believe that everyone should strive to optimize their overall performance using their unique data, and this includes physical activity, sleep, stress, emotional well-being and nutrition.

Out of 100, 71 was our Fitnescity average Wellness Score.

According to our Wellness Score, although we are maintaining our well-being through healthy eating, good water and alcohol consumption levels, and moderate exercise, we have to make further improvements.

Looking at the score breakdown more thoughtfully, our team decided to come up with an action plan. For starters, we focused on improving two areas, water consumption and healthy eating― because why wouldn’t we score 100%? First, water intake. We realized that while we were constantly drinking coffee, tea or basically anything with caffeine to boost performance, we neglected drinking water. It is not because we don’t like water, but because we don’t think about water. To change that, we put up simple signs around the office, to remind ourselves that drinking a lot of water, in fact, is an important step towards a healthy lifestyle. Second, we looked at nutrition. The test showed us that some of us were skipping breakfast quite often, not consuming enough fruits and calcium or indulging in foods that are high in saturated fat. In order to change that, we decided to get bulk orders of healthy snacks, such as RX bars, raw nuts, yogurt and fresh fruits to incorporate nutritious and balanced eating habits into our office lives. Lastly, to strengthen recovery, relationships, and mood, we started having morning yoga sessions at the office.

The impact of healthy habits, such as adequate nutrition, active living, reduced stress and reasonable work hours, is well-documented. These factors inevitably impact personal well-being, work performance and employee engagement (4) (5) (6). As a data-driven company, we wanted to go a step further and see how well were doing as a team, and how we can further improve everyone’s well-being.

We will take the test again in 2-3 months and publish the results here. So stay tuned!

What is your company’s New Year’s resolution? Contact us if you’d like to implement the Wellness Score at your work place.