Somewhere, right now, a well-meaning manager is booking a team-building day. There will be an activity – possibly rafting, possibly an escape room, possibly something that involves a rope and that no one over the age of 40 is fully comfortable with. There will be a debrief. There will be an enforced discussion of what the team learned about communication and trust. And on Monday morning, approximately none of it will have transferred into how the team actually works together.
Team building days have a stubborn problem. They’re based on the idea that people will start collaborating more productively after they’ve done something difficult together. Which sometimes they will. More often, people will be too busy being mildly anxious about the activity that they won’t have the genuine chats they’re there to have.
A spa break works on a completely different model.
Remove the pressure, the pressure to perform, and the workplace setting, and people talk. They really talk. The conversations that happen over a long lunch between spa treatments or in the blissful post-massage aftermath are the conversations that offices, meeting rooms, and team building activities simply don’t manage. People reveal things about themselves. They listen differently. The hierarchy flattens in a way that a ropes course never manages. For Spa Breaks Bristol, visit hatherleymanor.com/the-spa/spa-breaks-cotswolds/bristol
There’s also the shared restoration factor. A team that relaxes together – that collectively gets the reset that a proper spa break offers – returns with more than just improved dynamics.
They return with energy.