India, Sept. 22 -- There is a lot of advice around work-life balance, and most of it makes perfect sense. Work should stay at work, holidays should be holidays, and laptops should ideally have no place in a hotel room. Except that real life does not always work that way. There are weeks when work takes over, days when you are not necessarily working every minute but still need to be available, and times when you have very little leave left but could really do with a change of scene.

That was the thought behind a slightly unusual experiment we tried with our team. When Taj Mahal, New Delhi invited us to spend some time at the property, we wondered what would happen if we treated it as a workcation rather than a conventional holiday. So we...