National Tree Week

In November, we celebrated National Tree Week at Form3 - our 5-day Form3 virtual fitness challenge. Although it’s been a while, we want to take a moment to remember this great initiative that brought our team together from all parts of the world – and thank everyone for their efforts and achievements!

From 28th of November 2022 to 2nd of December 2022, Form3 committed to plant a tree for every kilometre our team collectively walked, run, cycled, or swam and tracked via our very own National Tree Week Strava group.

In this post, we’ve also included some photos of our team’s progress they shared on Strava throughout that week.

Our initial target was to plant 500 trees… but did we make it?

As part of our commitment to caring for the planet at Form3, our goal is to minimise our carbon footprint both through reducing emissions and carbon offsetting. Trees use carbon dioxide (CO₂) to build their trunks, branches, roots, and leaves – they can absorb up to 22lbs (10 kg) per year during their first 20 years of growth. Fully grown, the average tree absorbs 48 pounds (21.8 kg)!

It was very easy to participate. Our team simply had to track their activities using the app Strava and joining Form3’s club (some of our team already share what they’re up to!). This allowed everyone’s efforts to appear on our leaderboard, which enabled us to track, in real time, how many trees we were responsible for planting!

The leaderboard, separated by team, was refreshed every few hours to show who had tracked the most kilometres. There was a walking segment, a running segment, and a cycling segment. We also tracked who was winning in terms of minutes spent exercising. Updates were shared regularly, which kept everyone on their toes.

We also created a dedicated emoji (thank you, Kevin in Learning & Development!) to get our team to update their Slack status for the week and join the movement.

Needless to say, the competition was on from the start.

Our Finance Team took the lead (from the beginning?), with an average 6.3 trees planted per head. Could this have been because that week, they took as many walking meetings as possible?

It was great to see everyone participating and use this as encouragement even if it was for the lunchtime walk/ run/ cycle that is usually avoided.

In total, we achieved +460% more than our initial goal – we are proud to be planting 2,309 trees!

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Our Fun3 social calendar ensures not only ensures Form3 invests in ESG (which is crucial) but also ensures our team have enough opportunities to interact and spend time with the team. We have at least 1 event planned per month.

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