BDO Australia‘s graduate program runs an Urban Quest Melbourne team building experience for each new graduate cohort as part of their induction. The graduates who arrive for the event are typically one to two weeks into their careers — they may have met briefly in orientation, they know each other’s names, but they don’t yet know each other.
Two hours later, they do.
The Starting Point — Strangers Across Service Teams
BDO’s graduate intake draws from different service teams and, in many cases, different states. These are people who will be colleagues for years but who, at the point of the Urban Quest event, have almost no shared experience to draw on.
The graduates who spoke after the event described this dynamic directly. They came from different service areas — audit, tax, advisory, consulting — and had been placed into teams that cut across those divisions:
“We’re all graduates from BDO Australia, across different service teams. We’re just having a great time today.”
The team composition — deliberate mixing of service areas so that people who don’t normally sit near each other are grouped together — is the same principle Urban Quest applies across every corporate event. The format only produces the connection it promises if the people in each team don’t already know each other well.
“You See a Different Side of Everyone’s Personality”
The first thing the graduates noticed was how different people appeared outside the office environment:
“In the office it’s just one-sided. Out here, running around — it’s a different energy.”
“You see a different side of everyone’s personality as well.”
That observation is consistent across almost every Urban Quest event we’ve documented — clients, graduates, senior leaders, and frontline staff all make the same comment. The office reveals a professional version of a person. A competitive team challenge that involves running between clues, debating answers under time pressure, and celebrating together reveals something closer to the whole person. The colleague who is methodical in meetings might be impulsive under competitive pressure. The one who is quiet in presentations might be the loudest person on the leaderboard.
The Moment That Defined the Day
One graduate described the event’s social impact with a specificity that made the whole room laugh:
“Jack was in my team. I’d never met Jack really before today. And I was slapping him on the back, yelling at him. I think I was forced to come out of my shell a little bit.”
That moment — a self-described introvert physically celebrating with a near-stranger — captures what the Urban Quest format produces that no social event can engineer. Drinks after work create an opportunity for interaction. A competitive team challenge creates a necessity for it. The graduate who might have spent a drinks event on the periphery had no choice but to contribute, celebrate, and connect — because the format demanded it.
“We were forced a little bit to come out and just work, get along, work together as a team, figure out the solutions.”
“Not Something Where You Can Go Off on Your Own”
Several graduates noted that the Urban Quest format specifically resisted the most common team building failure mode — the dominant individual who solves everything while the rest of the group follows along:
“It’s not something where you can go off on your own and stand by yourself. You really have to work with your whole team.”
“Whether you had four or five in your team — everyone just joining in, working together.”
The challenge design enforces this. Urban Quest’s clue sequences require multiple people looking at the same problem simultaneously, and the time pressure means a team that’s waiting for one person to figure everything out will fall behind a team that’s distributing the cognitive load. The format makes collaboration structurally necessary rather than socially encouraged.
What They Didn’t Expect
The graduates’ surprise at the challenges’ difficulty was a consistent theme:
“I was expecting simpler questions. You really have to think.”
“I didn’t expect to work so closely together as a team. That was it.”
That surprise — that the challenges require genuine intellectual effort and genuine collective engagement — is the calibration Urban Quest’s challenge design aims for. Easy enough that every team makes progress. Hard enough that no individual can carry the team alone.
Communication as a Transferable Skill
When asked what the day had taught them, the answer was immediate and unanimous:
“Communication. Definitely. Making sure not to shy up and stand back — whether you had four or five in your team, everyone just joining in.”
For graduates entering professional services careers where client communication, team briefings, and cross-department collaboration are daily requirements, that lesson — experienced physically rather than described theoretically — is exactly what BDO’s graduate program is designed to accelerate.
Urban Quest has run team building events for BDO Australia’s graduate cohort across multiple years.
Explore Urban Quest’s corporate team building formats →
Read what actually changes after a team building event →
BDO Australia runs Urban Quest team building as part of their annual graduate induction programme. Urban Quest has delivered events for BDO graduate cohorts across multiple consecutive years.
BDO Australia is named an Inclusive Employer for 2021-2022 by the Diversity Council Australia (DCA).
They’ve been recognised by GradConnection as a Top 10 finalist in two award categories:
- Most Popular Accounting, Professional Services, and Consulting Employer
- Most Popular Internship Employer.
As well as being recognised as the Top 100 Graduate Employer finalist for 2022.
