{"id":992,"date":"2026-08-24T15:37:04","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T15:37:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elev8yourculture.co.uk\/?p=992"},"modified":"2026-08-24T15:37:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T15:37:07","slug":"the-away-day-isnt-the-fix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elev8yourculture.co.uk\/en\/the-away-day-isnt-the-fix\/","title":{"rendered":"The Away Day Isn’t the Fix"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve sat in a lot of rooms where a leadership team has just spent a full day and a decent chunk of budget on an away day, a wellbeing week, or a shiny new values poster for the staffroom wall, and everyone leaves feeling like something has genuinely shifted. Three months later, I’m back in the building, and the same three people are still burnt out, the same meeting still overruns every week, and nobody can quite explain why the “fix” didn’t stick.

It’s not that the away day was a bad idea. It’s that it was never going to be enough, and somewhere along the way, leaders stopped being able to tell the difference between an event and a system.

The pattern I keep seeing<\/em>

Across dozens of organisations now, the shape is nearly always the same. Something is clearly wrong, people are exhausted, trust is thin, good staff are quietly job-hunting. Leadership notices, and to their credit, they act. But the action is almost always visible, contained, and time-limited: a training day, a survey, a new set of values on a laminated sheet, a “wellbeing Wednesday.”

What almost never happens is anyone asking why the workload got there in the first place. Nobody touches the meeting structure that eats Tuesday afternoons. Nobody revisits who’s actually accountable for what, or why three people are quietly doing the job of four. The event gets delivered, everyone claps, and the underlying system, the actual machinery producing the exhaustion, carries on exactly as it was.

I don’t think this is laziness or bad faith. I think it’s much simpler than that: events are easier to commission than systems are to fix.

Why leaders reach for the visible thing<\/em>

An away day has a start time, an end time, and a budget line. You can point to it and say “we did something.” Fixing a broken workload model, or a decision-making process that routes everything through one overstretched deputy, or a recognition culture that only ever notices the loudest people in the room, that’s slower, messier, and much harder to put a nice photo of on LinkedIn.

There’s also a harder truth underneath this. Fixing the system usually means someone senior has to change their own behaviour, stop copying themselves into every email chain, stop calling the 7pm meeting, stop being the bottleneck they’ve built their identity around. It is much more comfortable to buy the team a fruit bowl than to ask a leader to give something up.

This is exactly where the Culture by Design work starts to matter. Wellbeing and workload sits as its own lever for a reason, but it almost never breaks in isolation. It breaks because Systems & Structures are wrong underneath it, because Leadership Behaviours haven’t shifted, or because Communication & Voice means people can’t safely say “this isn’t working” until they’ve already handed in their notice. Treat the symptom on its own and you’ll be back doing the same away day again next year.

What actually moves the needle<\/em>

The organisations I’ve watched genuinely turn things around didn’t skip the away day, a lot still ran them. But they treated it as the start of a conversation, not the solution to it. They asked harder questions afterwards: which meetings can simply stop happening. Who is the single point of failure in this process, and why. What decision is currently taking six people and three weeks that should take one person and a day.

None of that is glamorous. It rarely produces a good group photo. But it’s the difference between a team that feels looked after for a fortnight and a team that’s actually working in a system that makes sense.

A question worth sitting with<\/em>

If you’re a leader reading this and you’ve got a wellbeing initiative, a values refresh, or an away day coming up, it’s worth asking one blunt question before you book it: is this going to change the system people work in, or is it going to make me feel better about a system I already know is broken? The honest answer is usually the more useful one.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Written by Amy Fowles, education leader with 15+ years’ experience building and developing teams in challenging circumstances.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most leaders can tell when something’s wrong, so they book an away day, launch a wellbeing week, or put new values up on the staffroom wall. Three months later, nothing’s actually changed. Here’s why the visible fix rarely touches the system underneath it, and what does.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":995,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[57,69,63],"tags":[64,59,66,70],"class_list":["post-992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collabor8","category-culture-by-design","category-leadership-behaviours","tag-culture-by-design","tag-leadership-behaviour","tag-leadership-behaviours","tag-workplace-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Away Day Isn't the Fix<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Away days and wellbeing weeks feel like progress, but they rarely fix what's actually broken.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" 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