How We Use SalesScreen to Build Culture—While Getting Physically Fit!

It's been a difficult eighteen months. The pandemic has had such a massive impact on every aspect of our lives—it has completely changed the way we interact, travel and even work. But not every change has been bad. These changes have forced companies to think differently—whether that’s about how to work, how to communicate, how to engage employees, or how to build and maintain culture.

At SalesScreen, fun is in our DNA. Our company was started in 2011 with just a few friends, and over the past ten years, we have made even more friends, growing to almost 50 team members.

From the very beginning, it was important to our founder and CEO Sindre, that we not only had a great business model but also that SalesScreen was a fun and inclusive company to work for. As Sindre says, "What’s the point of having your own business if you’re not having fun?"

This resulted in a lot of traveling, parties, events, and late-night gaming sessions at the office. As we've grown over the years we've strived to maintain a culture where teammates enjoy spending time together.

We have teams in the United States, Norway, Sweden, Singapore, Spain, and the Netherlands that got used to seeing each other on a regular basis, even traveling together frequently.

So what did we do when the pandemic made it difficult to maintain this company culture?

Well, we found new ways to keep that culture going! We jumped on virtual quizzes, virtual wine/beer evenings; sending breakfast to employees, and much more.

But after several months, fewer and fewer people were participating in these virtual activities. It wasn't fun or exciting anymore. And morale was plummeting as we realized that lockdown had no real end in sight. So we had to think of new ways to engage with each other.

Luckily for us, we use this brilliant software called SalesScreen(yes, of course, we use our own platform!).

While we already knew that SalesScreen helped increase motivation and activity while building culture in a sales organization, we wondered if it was possible to leverage our platform for activities outside of sales?

Whether it's sales, sports, quizzes, or gaming, we can all relate to the friendly camaraderie and the desire to win. We knew that we could use this competitiveness to have some fun while we were stuck in our own cities.

Being a company with Engineers, we found out that we could easily integrate Strava with SalesScreen to have our own internal competition to help motivate and increase our physical activity. Starting last fall, we began a physical activity competition against companies Cognism and GetAccept, the company with the most kilometers in a month would win.

SalesScreen also started our own internal competition. The rules were simple - if you had over 25 kilometers in a month, you got a lottery ticket to‘Spin the Wheel’ at the end of the month, where you could win sports gear worth $200! During September alone our team ran, biked, walked and hiked over 2,335km. To compare, GetAccept did 978 km and Cognism 874 km.

We had so much fun working together, and competing against these other companies, that we quickly began setting up other physical competitions. This was a great way for us to interact with each other in a more fun and casual way, helping to maintain that fun culture we worked so hard to create in the beginning.

Starting at the beginning of this summer, we did a new physical activity challenge in SalesScreen—this time tracking minutes rather than kilometers to better include team members who are more into CrossFit and weights. During that month, we saw an increase of 4,767 workout minutes compared to April, and 9,630 minutes compared to February!

Most recently, in June we had an internal ongoing competition where we are working together as a team to reach different milestones. The competition is called Run4Pride. Each milestone we passed unlocked a higher monetary reward that the top individual can donate to a chosen Pride Charity.

Despite the obvious difficulties of the pandemic, we've had a lot of fun throughout the year with these competitions and activities. They've created talking points, team building, friendly banter, and helped maintain our culture.

If you’re interested in how SalesScreen can help you build and maintain an energetic, positive, and fun culture while also exceeding revenue goals, click here to request a demo!