Building an active community still gives office centre operators sleepless nights, while unconventional and consistently implemented activities lead to success. Olivia Quest has just ended: a game that engaged nearly 650 players from 80 companies.
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All people who work on a daily basis at Olivia Centre in Gdańsk, the largest office centre in Poland, could take part in the game. Olivia Quest was a project that lasted 3 weeks and consisted of solving various types of challenges and puzzles leading to guessing the master password. As many as 645 players took part in the competition, of which 38 people competed for the win in the finals. The winner was Filip Smurawa from Capgemini. Every day, throughout the game, the players had to try to guess the password of the day, to which the tasks scattered throughout the business center led them. All of them were a hint of the main password, for which a financial prize of PLN 1000 awaited the winner.
As Filip Smurawa admits, at first he was not interested in participating in the competition, but it was his colleagues who motivated him to finally try his hand: The initial slogans were relatively simple and this is why the game did not arouse my interest at the beginning. I was mainly inspired to participate by my colleagues from Capgemini and, inspired by their attempts to guess the next passwords, after three or four days I joined the fun. With the following days, the level of difficulty grew, and with it my curiosity. Quite quickly, we came up with the main entry, which undoubtedly helped with the auxiliary entries that led us to the final of the competition.
Maciej Olszewski, director of Olivia’s Communication Department, emphasizes that initiating this type of action is not only satisfaction, but also great fun for the whole team: Once again, the effects of the project proposed to tenants exceeded our expectations. It was the first time we had prepared such a game, so at first we did not know how our residents’ employees would receive it, and the numbers are astonishing: the participants made 32,845 attempts to guess the word of the day, and one of the words gained a record number of 1,386 attempts. In one of the companies, as many as 63 players took part in the game, who were puzzled over the slogans we entered. These data show that it is worth implementing such projects, so this edition of Olivia Quest will certainly not be the only one. We hope that in the next editions more participants will join the fun. – says Maciej Olszewski. The project was carried out in cooperation with O4 Coworking, from the conceptual side to implementation. This shows that the best ideas are the fruit of joint work.
Since the beginning of its existence, Olivia Centre has been consistently developing the idea of creating a community in its area. On a daily basis, this group is concentrated in numerous interest clubs, connecting lovers of photography, creating and editing films, plant care, sports clubs (football, cross-country running, volleyball or sailing), but also in such unique projects as the Olivia Centre Choir, which has a number of performances behind it, released its first album, and in recent weeks gave its first commercial concert, for which tickets were sold out long before the event. The legitimacy of the existence of a close-knit and active community was also confirmed in such exceptional periods as the pandemic or the beginning of the war in Ukraine, when employees of companies from Olivia collected computers for children during remote learning, did shopping for seniors and people in need, or organized a collection of the most urgently needed gifts for those fighting at the front and everything needed by war refugees arriving in Polish. On a daily basis, Olivia’s employees organize blood donations and work for animal shelters, and numerous initiatives allow them to integrate, exchange ideas and inspire the development of new interest clubs.
This is a great value of our project, which is important in recruitment, and even more so as a motivational factor that allows us to retain employees and contribute to higher attendance at work. – says Bogusław Wieczorek, representative of Olivia Centre. The research conducted by us shows that on days when additional events are organized in our centre, the attendance in offices is higher than on days when there are no such initiatives, and this is confirmed by the employees themselves: 64% of respondents make the date of coming to the office dependent on the schedule of additional activities that await them in Olivia Centre. 12% of office employees actively use our offer, and another 12% declare their willingness to join in the near future. These are hard figures, reflecting current trends in work and giving us a basis for developing these projects in the future.
