Members of a cybersecurity team decided to hit the pavement and the results are pretty incredible.
TechRepublic’s Karen Roby talked with Rahul Kashyap, the CEO of Awake Security, about his company’s plan to motivate employees to stay healthy. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Karen Roby: Rahul, we’ve been talking about this, and I love this idea, something that you guys have been doing to help incentivize your employees to stay healthy while working from home. Talk about your program encouraging the walk-and-talk and how this has really benefited everyone.
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Rahul Kashyap: We were kind of brainstorming ideas, this is a challenging time for everybody, I see a lot of stress. And people who think that working from home is not stressful–trust me, I have kids at home, it is not easy, right? It is definitely a challenging, uncharted, unknown time for a lot of us. What we did was, how do we balance work and have some fun element? We started this walk-and-talk, where we try to take as many meetings, which doesn’t require me to be on Safe Zone, for example, on a bigger conference, it’s best to just walk. I go around my street, to the trail nearby. I take as many meetings, walking and talking. And a lot of people in my company also are doing the same. A bunch of us have lost weight. I’ve personally done around 300 miles in the last 45 days. And now, we are challenging each other. We have all lost a bunch of weight. Doing a lot of miles is starting to become a fun challenge internally. And I’m really proud of that because we have to figure out ways to keep healthy, keep ourselves sane most importantly. At the same time, this is productive. We are still working, we are still being productive. We just found a very simple tweak on how to make this a more healthy exercise, if I may, in terms of having healthy meetings. It’s almost fun at work right now, and I’m totally enjoying it.
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Karen Roby: You’ve walked over 300 miles in just a short period of time!
Rahul Kashyap: Yes, I’ve lost 12 pounds. I’ve got five more to go in the next two weeks.
Karen Roby: It wasn’t just something you came up with as the CEO, but it was something that all together you thought would be fun and have some great results, too.
Rahul Kashyap: I’m also welcoming other people to give more ideas and share more ideas on how to be productive. If I have something else, I’ll definitely share more ideas with you for sure. We are all in this together.
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TechRepublic’s Karen Roby talked with Rahul Kashyap, the CEO of Awake Security, about his company’s plan to motivate employees.
Image: Mackenzie Burke