Use Salesforce to Track Fitness!

With today’s heightened focus on health concerns, the rise of affordable fitness wearables, and growth of employee wellness programs, employees increasingly are resolving to become healthier.

However, living an active lifestyle is much easier said than done.

We constantly have things getting in the way of achieving a healthier way of living. These can be things such as raising a family, additional stress at work, or just plain not having time.

One of the best ways to stick to a healthy goal (or any goal) is to keep track of the effort you are putting in. In other words, force yourself to write everything down. So what could we, as a company, use to track our fitness efforts and stick to our goals?

How Internet Creations uses Salesforce to track fitness

Given that we predominantly use Salesforce at Internet Creations, it was the obvious choice to see if we could use Salesforce to track fitness. In January 2015, the IC Fitness Challenge was born. The challenge consists of employees’ documenting their time spent doing physical activities. The participants with the highest amount of fitness points at the end of each month are awarded prizes.

Here are the steps I followed to track fitness in Salesforce.

Step 1: Create a Fitness Participant Object and individual record for employees

The first step in using Salesforce to track fitness was to create Fitness Participant records for all employees taking part in the challenge. To do this, I built a custom object called “Fitness Participants” and created a record for each employee interested in the challenge.

Step 2: Create a Child Object to track Fitness Entries

After building out the Fitness Participant object, I created a Child Object for “Fitness Entries.” I then added a master-detail relationship from Fitness Entries to Fitness Participant in order to track each participant’s fitness endeavours. When creating Fitness Entries, each participant has the ability to select the type of fitness performed using a multi-select picklist, as well as the number of points for their activities. Each user can log one point for every half hour of fitness, and each entry rolls up in a field on the participant record displaying total points.

Step 3: Enable participants to log their fitness from their mobile devices

After building out the primary objects for the challenge, I also wanted to allow participants to log fitness entries from their mobile device. To do so, I created a new action on the Fitness Participant object and set Fitness Entries as the Target object. Lastly, I added a few predefined field values to set the date field and Fitness Participant associated with the Fitness Entry.

The mobile action works great for participants who are on the go. Participants can easily jump onto Salesforce1 via their smartphones and log their fitness entries for the day.

Step 4: Create a report

After building out the logistics for logging fitness entries, we wanted to be able to report on each participant and their time spent exercising. To do this, I navigated to the Reports tab and choose “Fitness Participants with Fitness Entries” as the report type. I then added the Fitness Participant Name and Points fields to the report and grouped by Name. Lastly, I created a bar chart to allow participants to easily compare their earned points to others.

Step 5: Create a Chatter Group

Finally, I created a Chatter group for the Fitness Challenge. Fitness goals are easier to accomplish when you have others doing it with you and keeping you motivated. The group allows staff to offer feedback and suggestions for the Fitness Challenge, as well as to offer positive encouragement and healthy eating tips.

Using Salesforce to track fitness has been a great way for employees at Internet Creations to stay healthy and stick to our goals. It has already seen tremendous involvement and incredible outcomes and is a hot topic in the office. In fact, some members have even opened new gym memberships!

Looking to use Salesforce to track fitness in your own organization? Try out these steps and share your thoughts in the comments!