Harbourside Survivor 2025: Week 2
The challenges continued on Wednesday September 24th as Harbourside Survivor Dartmouth entered its second week.
After a suspicious email filled with golf-related puns, our brave engineers and administrative staff congregated outside the lunchroom for a high-stakes mini putt challenge. Although our PEI office would show Dartmouth how it’s done later in the week, our three Dartmouth Survivor teams were on their own!
Highest Score Wins
Unlike most games of putt-putt, the highest score would win this week’s challenge. That’s because each team member only had one chance to sink a hole-in-one. Red Team and Blue Team quickly displayed their excellent short-game, with each team getting one hole-in-one. Sadly, Green Team failed to sink a single ball and was left behind. This triggered a sudden-death round, where one contestant from each of the two remaining teams would race to sink the next ball.
In the end, Blue Team was victorious. The winning stroke was made by Vince, securing immunity for his team this week. Red Team and Green Team were forced to walk off the course towards the ballot box to vote off another team member each. Now Red is down two members, while Geen, still the largest team, is down one.
Simple, But Exciting
A key component to every challenge during our Survivor contest is simplicity. Each is fun, easy to accomplish, and requires very little physical ability or skill. The mini putt challenge is probably the one activity that actually requires manual dexterity. Even still, it is accessible to most everyone and can be completed in a few short minutes. This helps to break up the workday, and the added game-show element makes even a simple activity more exciting. It’s something our team looks forward to every week, even if it’s quick! This type of game fits within everyone’s busy schedule and still allows them time for what’s important: plotting, make alliances, and voting.
There is an added social element that appears outside the actual challenges as well. There are negotiations and bargains to be struck. Everyone knows that whoever gets voted off will come back during the final week (if you’ve never watched reality TV, this happens all the time). That means it’s important to maintain camaraderie even when voting someone out. This helps with team building, and encourages cooperation, even in the face of elimination. It also means that those who aren’t in the running for first place still have a role to play in the games overall.
This helps to contribute to strong corporate culture and forges lasting bonds. Overcoming difficulties in the workplace can also do this, but there is something special about working together for something that is non work related.
Are there similar events in your own office? What have you done as a leader in the workplace to forge lasting bonds among your team members? How do you keep competition from being the driving force (and driving wedge) between participants?