Thirty-five developers, programmers, and entrepreneurs joined together for a hackathon to compete for the top prize of $10,000. All with the goal of improving the professional personal wellness of Daimler employees through digital innovation. The event was sponsored by Daimler Financial Services in collaboration with the Digital Transformation Office for HR at Daimler.

Software platforms, mobile apps, and automated workflows — Daimler’s employees are unrivaled in achieving their customer service and efficiency goals. However, the most important factor is, and will be the human who sits at the center of every customer touchpoint.

“We at Daimler Financial Services have a strong corporate culture. The foundation is our employees, and we invest in them. This becomes tangible in the excellent results of the Great Place to Work survey. The further improvement of health and well-being for our employees could bring us to the next level.” — Frank Maruna, Head of HR DFS Germany

Seeking to embrace scalable digital solutions further, Daimler looked to the tech community for an answer.

“MobilityX is an innovation initiative where we are focusing on introducing outside innovation into our company. We conduct startup pitch competitions, hackathons or innovation bootcamps to be inspired by new and fresh ideas and to bring them back into our organization.” — Franziska Kaercher, Manager Business Development FC

Strangers Become Teammates

At the hackathon kick off in Austin, a vast swath of ideas were pitched by participants, discussed and then voted on by the group. While most of the newly formed teams emerged from this creative process, several participants came to the hackathon with existing ideas they were eager to flesh out and build up. Teammates Bhavin Gupta and Tabish Chasmawala were one such team: “When I worked at AirBnB, we did this thing called ‘the stair climb’ where all of us would meet in the lobby and race to the top of the 20-floor staircase as quickly as we could. We decided to replicate this idea for Daimler,” says Gupta. “After speaking with Daimler mentors, our idea evolved from tracking how many flights of stairs employees climbed, to studying how employees were moving across their campus,” Gupta continued.

Creative Solutions to Age Old Problems

Ideas ranged from apps that incorporate mindful practices into employees’ calendars, to a tool that puts pedometer functionality into security badges that track and reward employees’ healthy choices.

“The main thing that I take away from this hackathon is the wide range of ideas that people have to address employee wellness. For one person, that can be psychological security, and on the other hand, some people want to bring their dog to work or have yoga in the office. As a company, we have to take these needs seriously and address them.” — Sam Marshall, Director of Innovation Management for MobilityX

Convincing the Jury

After three days of hacking, the teams gathered to pitch to the panel of judges. Those were Timo Bularczyk, Frank Maruna, Josip Skafar and Josefin Lewetzky of Daimler, and Abba Binns, of Capital Factory.

Josip Skafar represented IT Daimler Financial Services in the judging panel and has been working with HR DFS on implementing several digital solutions.

“It’s important to assess the different ideas from a scalability perspective, so that we can secure fast and efficient implementation. People and culture is an important pillar of our strategy at ITF, and I am proud that we can do our part in helping generate additional value for our employees.” — Josip Skafar

In the end, “Intuitive Agenda” emerged victorious due to their seemingly simple solution to a very common problem; employees do not have enough time to participate in a corporate wellness plan. Instead of creating one more thing for employees to do, Intuitive Agenda builds in five-, ten- or fifteen-minute wellness activities to the Outlook calendars of Daimler associates.

Next Steps

Timo Bularczyk, Head of Digital Transformation Office HR Daimler, is more than happy with the hackathon and concludes:

“We want to enable our employees to do what they love, in their private life as well as in the business. People that love their job are satisfied and create awesome products, and this is what we want to foster.”

Daimler will build upon their successful cross-divisional collaboration around the hackathon and jointly follow-up on the ideas to continue their conversations with some of the teams on how to further develop their concepts into usable tools for Daimler’s 289,000+ employees.

About MobilityX:

Since 2017, Daimler Financial Services and Capital Factory have been partnering to create MobilityX, a transportation technology accelerator aimed at fostering the growth of new mobility-as-a service companies and bring innovative solutions to the transportation sector. The program is intended to help incoming startups accelerate the development of mobility-focused solutions and connect them into the Daimler ecosystem for business opportunities. MobilityX is part of Capital Factory, a proven, thriving startup accelerator and coworking space in Texas.