Away-days. An excuse for the management to inflict their bs strategic pipe dreams on us. Only you know that come the next away-day they’ll be giving you a different set of bs about a slightly different strategy because the last didn’t work quite the way they expected.

Now don’t get me wrong, management have a duty to the company they run/own to come up with the strategies but why is it that these new strategies always seem to involve the non-management working harder and having to handle more pressure whilst the management get a couple more holidays.

For example, our company’s new strategy is to build, host and manage ecommerce websites for companies that don’t have the facilities/budget to commission one themselves. In return a percentage of the sales will be kept by our company. Actually, its not a bad idea. But who’s going to pick up the extra work? A new team? New resources? No, that’s right, the existing employees who are expected to do the same work as before but now this as well.

So when the management say, “let’s have an away day to unveil the new strategy!” they may as well have said, “Let’s lure them from their homes and then rob them”. Ok, a little extreme but talk about sugaring the pill.

To be honest, once we got past the morning’s bullshit - the promises of potential exchanges with partners in exotic places and the pep talks convincing us that we are a slick, streamlined company – the afternoon’s frivolities were a lot of fun! So “bah humbug” me.

I just can’t get the thought from my head that the only strategy the company should have is “being better at what we currently do”. Is that too complicated? Although we haemorrhage money on every project because of our lack of process, our ideas and product delivery is good. Are the management thinking that expanding the business will automatically solve the process issues? They can’t be that naive. The strategy should be “lets shore up the processes in this company, train up these employees and make some real money!”. But no.

I would have settled for an email.