Increasing employee morale and support during a time of crisis
Dentons Europe: Walk for Peace, Walk with Purpose
Background & Goals
Dentons Europe at a glance
• Dentons is among the world’s largest law firms with 20,000 professionals in 200+ locations in 80+ countries worldwide
• The Firm’s offices in Europe and Central Asia participated in the Healthy Challenge in
collaboration with Personify Health
Opportunity
• Dentons holds an annual Healthy Challenge in Europe – which combines physical fitness, mindfulness, nutrition, and sleep – to encourage the wellness of its employees.
• Given that people had been sedentary and socially isolated during the COVID pandemic, the Firm wanted to make the 2022 Healthy Challenge even more engaging and innovative — fostering a healthy lifestyle, while bringing people together as a team.
• Based on a successful local project in one of their offices the year before, the Dentons team decided to partner with Personify Health to provide the platform for its Challenge.
Initiative
The Russian military invasion of Ukraine started a few days before Dentons was about to announce the challenge. The team decided to delay the launch and rethink its strategy in the context of the war.
• Given the additional stress and feelings of helplessness caused by the war, the leadership concluded it was more
important than ever to promote healthy living.
• The team decided to link the Healthy Challenge to the fundraising efforts of its charitable foundation. For each 50 million steps recorded on Personify Health, the Firm committed to donating €5000 to the Dentons Europe Foundation to provide humanitarian aid to Ukrainian families and children – up to a maximum of €50,000
• They branded the 2022 Healthy Challenge as “Walk for Peace, Walk with Purpose” Tactics that promote health and wellbeing
• The Personify Health app’s leaderboard provided a spirit of healthy competition among the teams – spurring them on to increase their activity.
• Linking the number of steps to charitable donations gave participants a sense of purpose and a common goal, which gave an extra motivation to take more steps.
• The team shared communications throughout the 9- week challenge to update people on progress.
“The team spirit, collaborative effort – I’ve never felt alone during this process. We’ve had team members pushing us along the way. The fact that there’s been a leaderboard to see where you are amongst your friendship groups and watch the other teams competing. For anyone that’s competitive, this is totally the way to go.”