Breaking the ice: Inspiring employee engagement through... hockey!

Submitted by Don Craig, New England Regional Leader (Boston, MA)

The hoisting of the Stanley Cup by the Boston Bruins’ Zdeno Chara on Wednesday night brought an end to the hockey season but also to our Stantec Stanley Cup Challenge between the New England and British Columbia regions, and I was left wishing there was more of both to come.

This little internal challenge, initially conceived during the Edmonton/Carolina NHL playoffs in 2006, demonstrates so much about Stantec’s values, opportunities, and staff. When we found out the Cup would be played for by Vancouver and Boston, it created a perfect opportunity to leverage the geographic diversity that we have (10,500+ staff in over 160 offices) and put our scrappy 400-person New England region up against a similar sized group in Canada; and what better purpose than to raise some money for charity and build some team spirit in the process?

For the challenge, staff in the New England and British Columbia offices were encouraged to donate $1 every day they wore their team gear to the office throughout the Stanley Cup finals. At the end of the series, the winning side would get the pooled money to donate to the charity of their choice.

The Vancouver office's Canucks pride

This event reinforced to me that as the Company has become larger and more diversified, we need to seek creative opportunities to engage local teams with others who they may rarely get a chance to work with. The Stanley Cup Challenge created a common bond for staff who were separated by 2,500 miles, three time zones, a border, and an endless argument about the pronunciations of “about,” “project,” and “process.”

Emails and calls from staff in the rival offices began ranging from images of Timmy Thomas voodoo dolls from Vancouver to staff in Westford, Massachusetts sending taunting messages to the printers in the Vancouver and Surrey, BC offices for unsuspecting staff to find when they arrived in the morning, or the Westford office posing for a taunting “finger-nibbling” team picture. A time will come when opportunities for these staff to work together on client projects will occur, and my hope is that this event will provide that initial ice breaker when they meet.

When the local NBC TV news visited the Boston office to cover the story of our challenge this week, the reporter asked me if having all this fun with the challenge was making it difficult for us to get our real work done. Of course it was! But there is such value in building relationships both within a local office and across the continent, and looking for even small ways to have a positive impact in our community, that it is an investment with a very quick pay off.

The Boston office at the Bobby Orr statue by TD Garden

Every time one of our team dropped in $1 for wearing their team colors, jerseys, bear head, or orca fin, there was a belief in their team and the awareness that ultimately this was going to a good cause. And we see this type of approach regularly in Stantec. From the Movember office challenge which gave some of the playoff ‘staches and beards a run for their money, to our current Cool Commute Challenge in which offices compete to use alternative forms of transportation, we have this incredible opportunity here to compete internally and truly act as One Team when it comes to our impact on the communities we live in.

Across the organization we have events like the Make-A-Wish campaign in Scarborough, Maine, to Meals on Wheels in Charleston, South Carolina, to the companywide “Dollars for Doers” program. The Stanley Cup Challenge shows that we can create a new initiative quickly, have some fun, give back, and maybe— just maybe—creates that spark that can lead to even greater opportunities: client collaboration, work-sharing across offices, mentoring…. or creating new Bruins fans across the continent.