Sensei

24 July

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What Business Does Well In A Recession?

Posted by Allen Baird, Partner in coaching

The stress business, that’s what! Executives and senior managers are making liberal use of an off-shore retreat that is more usually the haunt of celebrities and rock-stars. Causeway Retreat, situated on a private island off the Essex coast, promotes itself as an ‘Executive Addition Treatment and Mental Health Rehab Clinic’. The fees are around £10,000 for a week’s stay.

But according to a BBC article – Executive stress a boon for island rehab – the number of rooms and cotteges on the island will nearly double in the near future in order to cater for demand from the growing executive sector.

It seems to me that places like Causeway, while laudable, might be a symptom rather than a cure. If companies took more care of their employees during work, then they wouldn’t have to ship them off to such places when it gets too much.

Plus, I wonder how many middle-managers and supervisors get to go to these retreats? Not many, I think. Yet this is where the pressure lies. They are both the first to go when cuts are made, and the first to implement cuts on the ground. A nasty double-whammy.

Anyway, I was wondering if there might be a boom in Stress Management Training or Consultancy during these difficult times. It seems not. Such ‘non-necessary’ (i.e. not legislative) training is one of the first to go.

Stress Management? There’ll be enough time for that after we’ve got the recession turned around, right?

Wrong. By then it will be too late, and you’ll be left with employees off on stress, taking a wage without doing the work. It’ll cost you more. But since when did long-term thinking ever get in the way of a short-term deadline?

Until stress management becomes a pre-emptive and ‘institutionalised’ aspect of the modern organisation, retreats will keep creaming it in. And who can blame them.

Image credit: Dave-F.