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I work at a big corporation. (top 20 Fortune 500). They have announced for October and November that there is a Wellness contest. What it means is, if you walk 7500 steps a day 4 days a week or equivalent, and also record a total of 240,000 steps for the 2 months, you get a $50 gift card. You can use any pedometer or app that you want to count steps. If you do other exercises, there are conversions; no conversion for sex, boohoo. An hour on an elliptical machine is worth maybe 8000 (I forget exactly.)

I am naturally competitive, though less so as I get older. I can't stand any contest with "the honor system" because people are hopeless cheats. Now, there is no announced prize for the winner. It's really up to the individual to get their gift card, though they can lie about that as well. One man I know of put in his 7500 steps a day. The guy is so obese he gets winded walking to the elevator.

All that said, someone called "eva" on the wellness website claims to be doing 90,000 steps a day. If it was walking, you're talking 45 miles a day. Or maybe she runs a marathon each day. She is just the worst offender. The top 10 all are doing 35,000 steps a day, according to them. That's like a 6 hour workout at the gym.

Does this type of behavior irritate anyone else, or am I just hopelessly naive with my expectations of humans?

When I see people doing crap like that I try to just roll my eyes and move on. If you get pissed off at all the stupid people you will spend your entire life being pissed off.

What JBI said.

or...

Get a paint shaker and a pedometer. Most paintshakers seem to be about 700 shakes per minute. That's over a million 'steps' a day. That would be the mature response.

shaq_mobile wrote:

Get a paint shaker and a pedometer. Most paintshakers seem to be about 700 shakes per minute. That's over a million 'steps' a day. That would be the mature response.

Funny idea. The website does limit to 99,999 steps a day though. I agree that it's useless to get too angry since humans are often stupid. As long as they don't have any prizes for the "winner", I guess it doesn't matter. At my old job they did a very similar contest except there was a prize for the winning team, and the best liars were actually awarded an additional vacation day. That was a really dumb idea.

I would look at it this way...if no one in your company (either someone in HR or Eva's supervisor or whomever) calls BS on Eva and asks her to cease the fraudulent behavior, then you're probably not working at a very well managed company, and then treat that as an important piece of information in your future decision making.

Cheating in anything at work, even in "just for fun" contests, is not a very bright idea and I would not advise anybody do it even as a joke.

More and more fortune 500 companies have ethics requirements that even extend to their employee personal dealings. In some cases it goes to government contract eligibility; in other cases it's just fear of government punishment in the form of clampdowns such as IRS audits, sarbanes oxley, etc.

Why fortune 500? I think it's because big companies have the most to lose if they screw up and lose a couple of government contracts, or worse yet, get disqualified from future contract eligibility. Hence the no smoking rules and so forth.

In more and more companies, if you get caught perpetrating fraud in your professional life or even your after-hours life, even something as simple as fudging your steps for a health contest, or say your name ends up in the newspaper for fraud, DUI, leaving the scene of an accident, shoplifting, cheating on your wife, etcetera and evidence exists that you are guilty, you could be let go from your job. If you're high enough, you'll just be "asked to resign" so that the evidence doesn't come out.

About the only thing I know that still won't jeopardize your job is being a bad tipper. But give it time.

Anything that gets game-ified is going to get gamed or outright cheated. That's just the facts of life, and your coworkers are apparently no exceptions. Do it because it's good for you and there's a modicum of monetary motivation involved.

They should Add a before and after Photo along with a before and after weight.

Ahh they would probably photo shop and lie anyways.

Cheaters are in my top 5 Hate list along Liars and thieves.

People who cheat at competitive online simulators really push my buttons. When a 2 hour mission is ended by a cheater in Warbirds a WW2 flight sim or When I used to Race 2 HR races just to be wrecked by a person who had unnatural tire grip in Nascar racing 4 from papyrus, it is the base code to the sim bin racing leagues now I am pretty positive, but we had leagues that kept the cheaters out. I used to race with Dale JR and Martin Truex on tuesday nights and I have giving them car setup files with instructions over MS messenger since my setups where so loose and on the knifes edge you had to counter steer, but it was not drifting. The force feed back was so good in that game that it would almost pretty much tell you when you had to counter steer to keep from spinning on exits and entries. It was fun watching them try them during our hour practice and not be able to make it one lap without spinning out and crashing "I received plenty of private messages..what am I doing wrong" Even got them to join us on My server for races since at the time I had 2 IP addresses with a 940pin FX-53 at 2.6ghz and registered memory as the server for the race and roger wilco along with my 4800x2 system I raced on with the top of the line ACT labs racing setup with gas , brake , clutch along with the awesome gated 4 speed shifter with reverse that could be changed to a 5 or 6 speed with the adapter gate plates. when that shifter was new to mid life it was awesome to be able to go into a corner at watkins glen or sears point and go from 4th gear right to 1st or 2nd. Then the micro switches started to go and it would pop out of gear or downshift to 1st instead of 3rd and blow my engine in a split second. Very annoying when you are leading a race most of the time. But those days are ancient history now.

It's a $50 gift card, probably worth about $25 cash, for doing something you ought to be doing anyway if you don't want to die early.

On top of the gift-card-to-cash-value conversion, I suspect you have to put up with a tonne of marketing bull.

The real losers here are people being manipulated by such a transparent marketing excercise; If you want to be a fat unhealthy slob, be a fat unhealthy slob. If you want to be a gym-addict with 1% body fat, be that addict. Or, do anything in between - but do it because you want to do it for yourself.

This is the best advice.

Chrispy_ wrote:

...do it because you want to do it for yourself.

What BIF said.

Anything that gets game-ified is going to get gamed or outright cheated. That's just the facts of life, and your coworkers are apparently no exceptions. Do it because it's good for you and there's a modicum of monetary motivation involved.

QFT. People will try to exploit rules or out and out cheat; with a Fortune 500 you've probably got enough people to get at least a few bad apples ruining it.

We did a wellness contest that I won handily (without cheating; I was going through physical therapy for an injury--they decided that counted as exercise!) but we are a small office and all actually know each other; that helps.