In many organisations, colleagues work closely together on projects without ever really knowing each other as people. They share meetings, deadlines, and Slack channels — but the informal social layer that makes workplaces genuinely comfortable to operate in takes time to develop, and in busy teams it often doesn’t develop at all.
Rexa Golez, Product Domain Lead in Engineering Technology at Jetstar, experienced exactly this with her team. Their Urban Quest Melbourne CBD team building event brought together colleagues from the same broader department who collaborated professionally but hadn’t necessarily interacted much outside of work tasks. What happened during and after the event is what Rexa describes in her interview.
Why the Awkward Phase Exists — and Why It Matters
The awkward phase between new or unfamiliar colleagues isn’t a personality problem. It’s a structural one. Workplaces come with hierarchy, deadlines, performance expectations, and the implicit pressure to present yourself professionally at all times. Those conditions make casual, genuine interaction difficult — particularly for people who are still working out how to read each other.
Rexa named this directly:
“At work, it’s a different environment. We want to do something that is a fun way of still doing it as a team.”
The goal wasn’t entertainment for its own sake. It was creating conditions where the social layer could form — where colleagues could discover who each other actually are, not just how each other performs in a meeting.
What the Urban Quest Experience Produced
The competitive format gave the team something to focus on together that wasn’t work, which turned out to be exactly the right mechanism for building the connections they needed.
“Everyone was so competitive, but it’s still fun. It’s a fun way of competing, a fun way of getting ahead. It makes me — or us — know our team much better.”
The distinction Rexa draws between competitive and fun is worth noting. The Urban Quest format creates genuine competitive stakes — a leaderboard, time pressure, teams racing against each other — but within a context where the outcome doesn’t matter in any professional sense. People can be fully competitive without the social risk that competition carries in a workplace context.
The team dynamic she observed during the event was specifically what she had hoped for:
“Team effort — everyone was really good and contributing, acting as one team. No one was leaving each other out. Everyone was actively participating and aiming into one goal.”
That observation — “no one was leaving each other out” — is the outcome that’s hardest to manufacture through workplace interaction alone. In a meeting, quieter team members can drift to the margins without anyone noticing. In an Urban Quest team challenge, every person’s contribution is visible and needed.
The Specific Change That Carried Back to Work
The outcome Rexa described most clearly wasn’t about the event itself — it was about what changed afterwards.
“The main thing is that we made ourselves more comfortable to talk to each other, to put some of our ideas. It makes you know more about the person — it’s easier to gauge who they are. That’s what I learned from this.”
“When you go back, you know the people more. You’re more comfortable dealing with them. And it does help building that spirit back.”
That phrase — “building that spirit back” — suggests this wasn’t just about new connections. For some teams, the purpose of a team building event isn’t to create connections from scratch but to rebuild ones that have frayed under pressure. The Urban Quest experience provided the context for both new colleagues discovering each other and longer-standing colleagues reconnecting outside the pressures of their normal working environment.
On Why Organisations Should Prioritise This
Rexa’s closing observation is the most direct articulation of the ROI case for team building in a single sentence:
“Work is already hard enough. Doing some activities that are more fun, that remove that pressure and stress and that aim that is more particular with work — it really helps.”
The logic is simple and hard to argue with. The conditions that make work productive — clear communication, genuine trust, willingness to raise ideas — are also the conditions that an awkward social dynamic actively suppresses. Removing that awkwardness isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure.
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Rexa Golez is Product Domain Lead in Engineering Technology at Jetstar Airways. Urban Quest has delivered team building events for Jetstar across multiple cohorts and departments.
