Every team building enquiry eventually reaches the same conversation.
Someone with budget authority looks at the proposal and asks: is this an expense or an investment? Meaning — will we see a return on this, or is it just a nice day out that disappears from the team’s memory by the following Monday?
It’s a legitimate question. And the honest answer is that it depends entirely on how the team building is designed.
A poorly designed team building event is an expense. A well-designed one — where the experience is structured to produce specific outcomes that carry back into how the team works — is an investment with a return that can be measured in months, not just in the immediate post-event buzz.
Here’s how to tell the difference, and why the organisations that come back to Urban Quest year after year have already answered this question for themselves.
What Lane Harrison, Urban Quest’s Business Development Manager, Says
Lane Harrison has spent years talking to HR managers and team leaders across Melbourne about what they’re trying to achieve with team building — and what’s worked and what hasn’t. He’s also participated in Urban Quest events himself as a player, which gives him a perspective most business development people don’t have.
His core observation is consistent with what Urban Quest sees across thousands of events: the teams that treat their event as a genuine investment — rather than a social obligation to tick off the calendar — are the ones who prepare deliberately, choose an activity designed around real team outcomes, and debrief afterwards to translate the experience into something actionable.
The teams that treat it as a line-item expense tend to choose the cheapest or most familiar option, run it without a debrief, and wonder why nothing seems to have changed.
The ROI Question Answered by The Teams Themselves
The most credible answer to “is team building worth the cost?” doesn’t come from research papers or productivity statistics. It comes from the organisations that keep coming back.
Urban Quest’s repeat bookings tell a specific story. ExxonMobil has run four events. BDO has run four. Performio has run four. Pryda has returned multiple times. AvePoint’s Stephanie Webb has brought teams from two different organisations.
No organisation spends its team events budget on something that doesn’t deliver. The repeat booking pattern is the clearest possible evidence of return on investment — these teams experienced something valuable enough to want it again.
Anita Weller, Pryda’s technical writer and the person responsible for organising their team building events, articulated what keeps bringing them back:
“Because we’re in small groups and we can pair people together that don’t know each other as well, it just has a lasting effect… just how people got along and it has ongoing effects for the team.”
“Ongoing effects.” That’s the investment language. Not “we had a great day” but “it kept producing something in how the team operated for months afterwards.”
She elaborated on why Urban Quest specifically earns that repeat booking:
“We have used you before, and we like that your challenges are about using your brain and not about embarrassing yourself out on the street. No public singing, no running too fast unless you really want to. It’s just about using your brain a bit and figuring out puzzles and things along the way.”
The inclusivity she’s describing isn’t just about comfort — it’s about ensuring the full range of team members are genuinely engaged. An event in which half the team feels sidelined or embarrassed yields half the return. An event where every person contributes produces outcomes across the whole team.
Six Reasons Well-Designed Team Building Delivers a Return
1. It Changes How People Communicate
The most direct and measurable return on team building investment is improved communication — and not in a vague, hard-to-track way. Teams that have solved problems together under time pressure, where clear communication was the difference between winning and losing, develop new communication habits that carry directly into meetings, project handovers, and difficult conversations.
Lane Harrison noted in his experience as an Urban Quest participant: communication that works under game pressure translates directly back to the workplace. The team members who found a rhythm during the Quest are the same ones who communicate better in the sprint retrospective the following week.
2. It Surfaces Hidden Strengths
The return here is talent optimisation — discovering capabilities in team members that normal role-based work never exposes. The person who seems peripheral in meetings might be an exceptional strategic thinker under pressure. The quietest person in the room might be the one who spots the pattern everyone else missed.
Matthew Ruddick, National Sales Manager at Jotun Paints, described this directly after his Urban Quest event:
“It just gave everybody the opportunity to step out of their comfort zone and lead people they wouldn’t usually lead as well.”
When a manager discovers that a team member has leadership capacity that they haven’t been given the opportunity to demonstrate, that’s a return on the team building investment that shows up in how that person is deployed, trusted, and developed going forward.
3. It Accelerates Trust Between New Team Members
The time and productivity cost of new team members reaching full effectiveness — what researchers call the “integration lag” — is one of the most consistently underestimated costs in any growing organisation. It typically takes three to six months for a new team member to be fully trusted, fully communicating, and fully contributing.
A well-designed team building event compresses that timeline significantly. Not to zero, but meaningfully. New members who have shared a genuine challenge with their team — where they contributed, where their colleagues relied on them — carry a different kind of social capital into the team than those who’ve only had formal introductions and polite workplace interactions.
4. It Breaks Down Silos Between Departments
Cross-departmental collaboration is consistently cited as one of the hardest things to create and sustain in growing organisations. Departments develop their own cultures, their own internal languages, their own unspoken hierarchies. The result is parallel work that should be collaborative.
Team building events that deliberately mix departments — putting the accounts team with the IT team, or the sales leaders with the operations staff — produce informal relationships that make future collaboration easier. Michelle Todaro from eSuperfund ran their Urban Quest specifically for this reason, mixing accounts, IT, and operations staff. Her assessment afterwards was clear:
“You get to know people on a personal level. When you’ve shared an experience like this, it really helps to bond team members.”
5. It Produces Measurable Performance Data
This is the dimension most team building providers don’t offer and Urban Quest does: the event itself produces data. Urban Quest’s platform tracks every team’s performance throughout the experience — contribution levels, decision-making patterns, completion times, engagement across different challenge types — which feeds directly into the post-event debrief.
That data transforms the event from an enjoyable experience into a diagnostic tool. Teams leave with specific, named observations about how they operate — not generic “good communication” feedback, but specific insights about where leadership emerged naturally, where decision-making broke down, and what each team member contributed under pressure.
For organisations that add Urban Quest’s Strategic Debrief, those insights become action points. That’s the difference between a team building event that feels good and one that changes something.
6. The Effects Last Longer Than the Day
The return on investment from a well-designed team building event doesn’t peak on the day and then decay. For teams that experience genuine connection and genuine challenge together, the effects compound over time — each subsequent interaction in the workplace is shaped by the shared reference point the event created.
Pryda’s Anita Weller put a specific timeframe on it:
“The last time we did Urban Quest it had a lasting effect for a year or so.”
A year. That’s the denominator in the ROI calculation — not the cost of one afternoon, but the cost divided by twelve months of improved team dynamics.
What Makes The Difference Between Expense and Investment
The gap between a team building event that produces lasting returns and one that produces a pleasant afternoon isn’t the activity itself — it’s three design decisions.
Deliberate team composition.
Mixing people who don’t normally work together creates new relationships. Keeping existing friend groups together confirms existing ones. The former produces a return; the latter produces a social outing.
Structured outcomes, not just activities.
An activity gives people something to do. A structured outcome gives people something to take back. Urban Quest’s experiences are built around communication, problem-solving, and leadership — not because those words sound good in a proposal, but because those are the skills that directly transfer into how a team functions on Tuesday morning.
A debrief that translates experience into insight.
Without structured reflection after the event, even the best experience stays as a memory rather than becoming a behaviour change. Urban Quest’s Strategic Debrief option exists for exactly this reason — it’s the mechanism that converts an afternoon into a return on investment.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I justify team building spend to leadership?
The strongest argument is the cost of the alternative — which is not zero. Disengaged teams, poor communication, slow integration of new starters, and low cross-departmental collaboration all have measurable costs. Frame the team building investment against those costs, not against zero. One well-designed event that accelerates new-starter integration by two months, for a team where each person costs $80,000 per year, is worth approximately $13,000 in productivity recovered — far more than the event itself.
How often should we invest in team building?
Once or twice per year for a sustained effect. Urban Quest’s repeat clients tend to run events at the mid-year and end-of-year points — mid-year to reset team dynamics and energy after the first half, end-of-year as a celebration that doubles as genuine team development. The organisations running four events per year (ExxonMobil, BDO, Performio) are using team building as an ongoing development mechanism, not a one-off event.
What’s the minimum group size where team building produces a return?
Urban Quest works with around 6 people upward. Below that, the competitive team dynamic that drives genuine engagement is harder to generate. The sweet spot for most organisations is 20 to 160 people — large enough for real competition between teams, contained enough that every individual’s contribution is visible.
Does Urban Quest provide anything to help make the case internally? Yes — get in touch, and we can provide information on outcomes, repeat client statistics, and our data-driven approach to measuring team performance during events. We can also arrange a conversation with Lane to discuss what specific outcomes your team is looking to achieve.
Explore Urban Quest’s corporate team building formats →
Read more about what actually changes after a team building event in the words of Melbourne teams who’ve experienced it.
Or hear directly from organisations across Melbourne on our team building success stories page.
Urban Quest has delivered over 8,500 corporate team building events across Melbourne for organisations including Pryda, ExxonMobil, BDO, Jotun Paints, AvePoint, eSuperfund, Jetstar, Medibank, and many more.
