Zerodha CEO Nithin Kamath announces employees will get bonus on losing weight

This year, on World Health Day, Zerodha, a financial services firm, made a major announcement encouraging its staff to live a healthy lifestyle. With one simple condition, all employees of a financial services company were guaranteed half a month's income as a bonus. On Thursday, CEO Nithin Kamath noted that finding a person's body mass index (BMI) is the simplest method to begin a health and fitness journey.

According to Kamath's LinkedIn and Twitter posts, employees with a BMI of less than 25 will receive a bonus of half a month's income. Not only that, but if an employee's BMI falls below 24, he or she will receive a bonus of half a month's pay by August, he said. Kamath asked other businesses to take part in the challenge, which he mentioned as "healthy competition."

 

We are running a fun health program at @zerodhaonline. Anyone on our team with BMI <25 gets half a month's salary as bonus. The avg BMI of our team is 25.3 & if we can get to 24 by Aug, everyone gets another ½ month as a bonus. It'd be fun to compete with other companies  1/3 — Nithin Kamath (@Nithin0dha) April 7, 2022

 

"The average BMI of our team is 25.3 and if we can get to the lowest average BMI or the largest change in average BMI wins. The winner chooses a charity everyone else contributes to. Maybe a health tech company can run the initiative," Nithin tweeted.

"I know BMI isn’t the best measure to track health and fitness, but it is the easiest way to get started. With health and most other things in life, the most important bit is to get started," he said, stating that walking 10,000 steps a day is a good way to start for everyone who wants to stay healthy. On Forbes' list of India's wealthiest in 2021, Nithin Kamath and his older brother Nikhil Kamath, co-founders of Zerodha, India's largest stock brokerage house, were listed 86th. 

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