What’s your company’s resting heart rate?

Count.It has spent the last four years cracking the code of fitness tracker-driven challenges, and our business is spiking — we added nearly 500 groups in April, and this includes both SMBs as well as teams from within multinationals, like IBM, Siemens, PepsiCo, and Goldman Sachs, etc.

In the process of running challenges, we collect a great deal of human activity data. These days fitness trackers report on far more than steps — they can track all manner of different exercises, and monitor sleep patterns, heart rate, and stress levels.

Since any data collected on individuals in a group can be aggregated to present a picture of the group as a whole, it becomes possible to ask simple biometric questions of your company. And, since Count.It hosts thousands of groups, we can index the biometrics of one company vs. others

Conceptually, then, you might wonder what the resting heart rate of your company was at the end of the quarter, and/or how it compares to that of your top competitor? Or, for fun, you might ask: Who gets more sleep, employees at Amazon, Facebook, or Google?

This may sound whimsical, and we’re a long way from listing a company’s physical “vitals” next to its stock price, but feedback is essential to any effort at behavior change. Without data, there can be no objective measure of progress, or even clear goals. So, at a very basic level, capturing human sensor data, and reporting it back to groups, is critical to the mission of building healthy workplaces, and, more generally, to building any healthy group culture.

People are more and more careful about how they share their personal data, and with whom, and rightfully so. But, if done right, which is to say thoughtfully, securely, and with everyone’s active consent, then data sharing can also be a powerful force for driving deeply desired and healthy change.