Stepathlon: Making Corporate India Healthier

Mark your calendar: This month is ‘Walktober’ and the next month will be ‘Movember’. That’s how Ravi Krishnan, co-founder and CEO of Stepathlon, is trying to add a healthy step in the lives of executives through a corporate wellness programme. His aim: To get them to walk 10,000 steps a day for 100 days (by December 20).

Companies that sign up for the programme pay Rs 2,528 per participant (the costs include a pedometer). Employees then divide themselves into teams and enter the number of steps they’ve walked each day on the website to compete against each other on a virtual walk around the world.

Stepathlon’s small office in Khar, Mumbai, is bustling with activity: Its second year of operation has seen a 50 percent growth in participants to 30,897 this year.

Stepathlon works with 210 companies across 34 countries (including 4,000 participants from Australia). The result is a fitter workforce: 46 percent of the participants took less sick days last year, for example. Stepathlon has gone from 122 to 434 cities across India and ‘Stepathletes’ are spending almost 8 minutes on average on the website each day. “I was at a walk with HDFC Bank recently—one guy has lost 6 kg,” says Krishnan, “At Cognizant, someone had lost 4 kg. At Titan, a man said, ‘I haven’t taken an elevator since September last year.’ ”