When Sportsbet needed a team building experience for 700 employees at their annual conference, the brief went beyond logistics. Katie Barry, Organisational Development Consultant at Sportsbet at the time, wasn’t looking for an activity that filled a time slot. She wanted something that could bring Sportsbet’s five company values to life in a way that felt genuine rather than corporate.
The five values — Play 3D, Be Bold, Our Fun, Their Fun, and Reflect, Learn and Improve — aren’t abstract slogans at Sportsbet. They’re the operating principles the company runs on. The challenge was finding an experience that could demonstrate all five simultaneously, across 700 people, at Marvel Stadium, within a tightly packed conference schedule.
Urban Quest’s custom True Detective format was the answer. A bespoke Innovation Hub Challenge designed around the values framework, delivered with a Team Activator warm-up before the main event.
Team Activator — Meeting People You’ve Never Met
With 700 employees in attendance — many from different departments who rarely crossed paths — the day began with Urban Quest’s Team Activator session during morning tea. The goal was simple: get people talking to colleagues they didn’t know before the competitive pressure of the main event began.
For a company that had grown significantly, the scale of unfamiliar faces was striking. One employee who had been at Sportsbet for eleven years captured the moment:
“Probably surprising how many people we have working here now. I’ve been here 11 years and so many faces I haven’t met before. That’s the most surprising thing.”
The Main Event — Bespoke Innovation Hub Challenge at Marvel Stadium
The custom challenge at Marvel Stadium was designed around Sportsbet’s specific values framework. Teams formed across departmental lines — by design — and immediately got to work. The strategies that emerged were spontaneous and specific.
One team coordinated entirely through WhatsApp:
“We are frantically sending each other messages trying to get someone who can get the correct answer in. It’s working out quite well. I think it took us a little while, but we got there in the end.”
Another divided and conquered:
“We’ve divided and conquered in our team — that was our strategy and that’s the best way. We’re using our WhatsApp chat really well and really productively to get all our answers in. So I think we’ve got a good chance.”
A third team found a rhythm through task specialisation:
“It takes a lot of strategy and technology, which we enjoy. Each of us has our own tasks — it’s going smoothly and quite efficiently, I must say.”
“It’s very engaging and motivating to be doing this in an open space. It’s not just playing a game — it involves thinking about how we’re going to do it best.”
“Be Bold” — The Value That Came Alive Most Clearly
Of Sportsbet’s five values, one emerged most naturally from the Urban Quest format:
“One of our company values is to be bold. This kind of pushes you out of your comfort zone and gets you thinking in a different way, which I think helps with creativity and being bold.”
That’s not a facilitator telling participants what the value means. It’s an employee discovering it through direct experience — solving a challenge that required lateral thinking, in an unfamiliar setting, with people they’d never worked with before. The value became observable rather than stated.
The Moments That Made It Memorable
With 700 people across a full conference day, the details that stick are the unexpected ones.
A Beyoncé song played backwards — and someone had a dance:
“I did like listening to the backward songs. Had a bit of a Beyoncé dance to Single Ladies back to front. I’ve never heard that before — that was new.”
A surprise cultural reference nobody expected:
“I’m a lot better at movies than I thought I was. Definitely Freddy Krueger.”
And the Marvel Stadium setting itself on a perfect Melbourne day:
“Good to be outside, good weather, and interacting with everyone in the business that we don’t normally get to hang around with. Great day.”
“Everyone loves Marvel Stadium. And what a beautiful day we’ve got for it, too.”
What a 700-Person Event Actually Produces
The measure of a large-scale team building event isn’t the energy on the day — it’s the social fabric it leaves behind. When 700 people who work at the same company but rarely interact are grouped into teams, given a competitive challenge, and sent to solve it together, something specific happens: they discover each other.
The eleven-year employee who had never met so many of his colleagues. The team that found their WhatsApp rhythm and ran with it. The participant who discovered she was better at movie trivia than she’d thought. The employee who felt “Be Bold” stop being a value on a wall and start being something she had actually done.
That’s what Urban Quest delivered at Marvel Stadium. Not a team building activity. A day that made Sportsbet’s company values observable, competitive, and genuinely fun — for 700 people at once.
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Katie Barry was Organisational Development Consultant at Sportsbet at the time of this event. Urban Quest delivered a custom 700-person team building experience for Sportsbet at Marvel Stadium as part of their annual conference.
