Taking time out away from the office can help staff reboot. Photo / 123RF
New Zealanders are rarely at the front of the queue to looking after their health and wellness but corporate retreats offer help, writes Juliette Sivertsen
Are you suffering from job creep? Where home is not the restful reprieve from work pressure it may once have been?
If you feel you're languishing, you're not alone, given the long term anxiety and ongoing global uncertainty as a result of Covid-19. Languishing is the opposite of flourishing, and it's hard to flourish in an ongoing global pandemic.
"We have seen an increased number of people who are either at or are approaching burnout since Covid," says Joelene Ranby, the founder of Resolution Retreats, a women-only health programme at Lake Karapiro.
"In our experience of running health and wellness retreats for almost a decade, we have seen that Kiwis, in particular, tend to wait until they are on their knees before investing in their own health and wellness."
After last year, thinking it was the worst year that could take place, people looked to 2021 for a new beginning.
"Many people were excited to say goodbye to 2020, and hoped for a brighter 2021, and were mentally relying on the Christmas holiday season to help them bounce back, only to be thrown back into some of the same stressors that surrounded us and wiped them out in 2020, with yet more uncertainty around the future piled on top," says Ranby.
When that fresh new break never happened, Ranby and her team recognised a gap in the market - resilience training. A corporate retreat for both men and women, with specific training to help people strengthen their wellbeing.
The company is now offering Resilience Retreats to corporate workers as a way to help teach people coping strategies and tools when in times of stress, both professionally and personally.
Once, corporate retreats were seen as a mundane exercise, sitting in a room in front of a PowerPoint and a box-ticking exercise - but these days, it's about teaching actual coping strategies for the workplace and homelife. Workshops on this retreat include managing stress, habits, productivity, improving sleep and enhancing communication skills, all while staying in luxury accommodation at Lake Karapiro.
"Too many people don't acknowledge the importance of the sleep and happiness quadrants of the wheel of wellness, and because they are 'soft skills' and deemed less important," says Ranby.
"Most of us aren't tuned into the signs that overwhelm is approaching. So we keep pushing hard, thinking there is light at the end of the tunnel if we just work harder and push through. But in overwhelm, more pressure makes you less productive."
A number of tourism companies are now offering corporate retreats, recognising the benefits of getting workers out of the office, especially with the increase in people working remotely because of the pandemic. Walking company Terra & Tide on Waiheke Island offers group workshops and forest therapy exercises for corporates, luxury holiday experiences company Release Wānaka runs corporate wellbeing programmes, and foodie hiking company Nature and Nosh has started "Bush Boardroom" packages.
Nature and Nosh founders Kylie and Steve Rae discovered their business meetings were more productive when hiking in the bush, so they knew it was something they needed to promote to workplaces.
"People are arriving with a huge amount of work-related stress from the daily overwhelm of their jobs that seems to be accepted as normal these days," says Kylie. "I've also noticed increasing levels of anxiety from this constant climate of uncertainty we find ourselves in. Add those together and it's unfortunately a recipe for burnout, which we are seeing more of, over the past year particularly."
The bush boardroom package includes a mindful hike to reduce noise in everyone's minds, a wild-food foraging workshop and team building activities in the great outdoors.
Because there's limited cellphone reception, those face-to-face meetings are undisturbed by the pinging of phones or devices.
"Getting people outdoors into a pristine natural environment and just away from their everyday surroundings does more than take their minds off the stress. There's research to prove that it lowers blood pressure, increases mood and mental clarity," says Kylie.
"For a simple concept, it really is magic."