Could a trip to the day spa be good for your business?

Mental health isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a legitimate business variable. Whether you’re flying solo, and it’s your own mental state, or you are far enough along in your business journey to employ staff, you need to take employee wellness seriously.

As an expert consulting brand in SMME marketing, communication and business management, we’ve been around long enough to know that most founders make the grave mistake of ignoring or overlooking HR. It’s a shame, especially with most founders being product experts and not always having the experience and skills to run entire businesses or manage high-calibre staff.

Work stress hasn’t gone away. It’s worse.

Working remotely doesn’t actually reduce stress. It just changes the kinds of stress and the timeline patterns for the ups and downs:

Instead of commuting in the morning, people are immediately expected to sign on and start functioning at peak performance.
Without the commute in place, it’s often taken for granted that the would-be commute time belongs to work and people should be online for sometimes an additional 2-3 hours compared with in-office uptime.
It’s rare that members of the same household share sufficient alignment in terms of work-related matters so there’s unlikely to be any mental respite over water cooler conversations, lunch breaks or during conversations that used to be had in hallways and while waiting for boardroom meetings to begin.
Picking up the kids from school doesn’t count as adult social time, which we really need and depend on as humans. Also: not everyone has kids.
Have you seen the size of some apartments today? It’s like living in a solitary confinement space at one of the world’s toughest prisons. No wonder people are behaving as if they’re boxed in: they legitimately are.

Living in denial really doesn’t help you or your business

We can’t keep pretending that people are machines and that we can run them until a replaceable part breaks. Working people are stressed and it’s going to create problems for you if it hasn’t already done so:

Increased sick leave due to physiological effects of long term chemical and mental stress
Reduced production time due to increased sick leave requirements
Late delivery dates and increased hiring and operational costs due to reduced production time
Less profit due to higher operating costs

You can’t honestly be reading this and still try to justify that stress is for people to sort out by themselves. It’s good business sense to invest in the right solutions instead. One of those solutions might literally be a trip to a day spa.

What can a day spa offer a business like yours?

Day spas have a mixed reputation in different parts of the world. In some areas, visiting one is still considered to be an ultra-luxurious experience. In other places, it’s a way of life; it’s a natural choice for managing stress levels.

Different types of day spas

To see the right business benefits, your staff need access to the right kind of treatments and wellness experiences for their respective mental states.

There are therapeutic spas which recognise and develop treatments around healing particular conditions, such as burnout or clinical depression. These conditions are on the rise among working professionals, particularly remote workers (so you may want to find treatment centres nearby your remote workers).

Ayurvedic, homoeopathic and pure oriental spas use only organic treatment products, most of which are naturally harvested from healthy and well-sustained ecosystems.

Aesthetic clinics focus on an appearance-first approach and often use the latest most innovative (sometimes questionable) treatment methodologies.

Full on retreats offer an immersive experience and extreme escapism: the kind that makes you believe in fairytales and fully let down your guard.

How do SMMEs tap into employee wellness with day spas?

The short answer: you bake day spas and wellness centre experiences into your employee wellness programme.

Yes. You should have an employee wellness programme. It doesn’t mean you need to blow any chance of being profitable to sustain one. It means that you need to create an employee experience that nurtures and inspires the people working for you.

Start by gathering the physical addresses of all the people on your staff roster and looking for day spas nearby each of them.
For your first foray into this kind of employee wellness, you may want to start with a simple treatment like a head, neck and shoulder massage.
It’s easy to get a price range for this kind of treatment and use that to plan your budget.
You can either stagger the treatments so that each month or quarter a different group of staff get a half day to attend their treatment and a counselling session with a mental health professional or you can choose to make it a company-wide day to indulge, like a year-end event.

Leverage your HR department to build upon this foundation

Increased sick leave due to physiological effects of long term chemical and mental stress
Reduced production time due to increased sick leave requirements
Late delivery dates and increased hiring and operational costs due to reduced production time
Less profit due to higher operating costs

If you don’t know what to keep or cull, how must your staff know?

Worried that you don’t have an HR department, or an employee wellness programme? We can help with that. Get in touch with us and share your deepest questions about building a happy high-performing team. One of our fractional experts will reach out to assist you, if necessary.

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