Office Massage for a Team of Five

Most writing about corporate massage assumes a company with an HR department and a wellness budget. A great deal of Bangkok runs on teams of four to eight people in a serviced office, and the arrangement works just as well at that size — it is simply a different shape.

A small team is easier, not harder

The hard part of a large wellness day is the queue. With five people there is no queue. One therapist, five thirty-minute sessions, and the whole thing is done in under three hours with no rota to manage and nobody standing about.

It also means you can offer something longer. At ฿850 for forty-five minutes, five people is ฿4,250 — about four hours of one therapist's time, and forty-five minutes is long enough to cover the neck, shoulders, upper back and forearms properly rather than gesturing at them.

What the space has to be

Corporate office massage is worked in a portable chair the therapist brings, through clothing, with no oil. That removes the two things a small office usually cannot provide: a changing room and a treatment table.

What you do need is somewhere that is not the middle of the floor. A meeting room is ideal. A quiet corner works. The reason is not privacy in any formal sense — nobody undresses — but being watched by four colleagues is not relaxing, and the point of the exercise is relaxation.

In a serviced office or a co-working space, check with the building first. Most are entirely relaxed about it; a few have rules about outside practitioners in shared areas, and a meeting room you have booked is a different proposition from the common lounge.

Scheduling five people

Write the times down. Even with five people, "come when you're free" produces two people at once and one who forgets.

Half an hour each, starting at two, means slots at two, half past two, three, half past three and four — and you are finished by half past four. Leave ten minutes at the start for the therapist to set up and find the room.

One person should own the list, and it should not be the therapist. Chasing a colleague who is on a call is not their job.

Paying for it in a small company

At this size the cost is small enough that it tends to come out of a team budget rather than a benefits budget, which makes it easier to do and easier to repeat.

Quarterly is the interval worth aiming at. Five people at thirty minutes, four times a year, is ฿12,000 annually — a figure most small companies can place next to what they spend on a single team dinner.

Time it deliberately rather than evenly. After a launch, at the end of a quarter, in the week everybody has been staying late. It registers far more than the same spend in a quiet month. A wellness budget staff will actually use goes into the choice between frequency and length.

When somebody wants something longer

In most small teams there is one person whose neck has been a problem since March. A fifteen-minute chair session is not going to address that, and it is worth being honest about the difference.

Office syndrome massage at ฿900 for forty-five minutes or ฿1,200 for sixty is built around the desk-work pattern and can be delivered at a desk. Some small companies run the chair session for the team and let that person book something longer at home on the company's account. Office syndrome in Bangkok covers what the treatment does and does not do.

We cover twelve districts with no travel surcharge in any of them, and the service areas page gives arrival estimates. The corporate page has the arrangement in full, the treatment list with prices is on the home page, and you can send a request with your team size and the afternoon you have in mind.