Mindfulness in the Workplace

Building Resilience

“Mindfulness is a quality of mind that we all experience and enjoy from time to time, but it can be greatly strengthened with practice, and once it becomes sufficiently strong, it leads directly to the attentional calmness and clarity that forms the basis of emotional intelligence” Chade-Meng, Tan, “Search Inside Yourself”, Google.

Organizations and workers are increasingly challenged by the pressures of the contemporary work environment. And while some stress is healthy for motivation, too much can impact on workers’ emotional wellbeing, affecting their ability to function to their optimum and perform their jobs. In some cases this can result in health-related absenteeism and burnout.

The challenge for organizations is to prioritize their most important resource (the human one) so that they are better able to meet the ongoing demands of the workplace. Organizations seeking to build resilience in their individuals and teams are increasingly utilizing  mindfulness training to achieve this.

Focused attention – why is it important to learn this skill?

Our usual states of mind are often distracted, fragmented ‘busy brains” and no more so than at work. The cornerstone of training the mind is developing the capacity to  hold a steady, clear and objective attention, and being able to move this attention at will. This focused attention can be directed to inner and outer experience, creating a friendly, grounded ‘viewing space’ of awareness, in real time.  In this space, you are fully awake and attending to what is happening, at once alert and relaxed. So when you are ‘triggered’ by challenging situations, you’re more able to pause before you react, and instead, choose to respond more wisely and intelligently to what is at hand.

Benefits in the Workplace

Put simply, people who are skilled at working with their minds and mental states are likely to be more productive than those who are less skilled in these areas. The Mental Health Foundation in the U.K Mindfulness Report (2010) describes a range of capabilities reported following mindfulness training. Some of the benefits to individuals in workplaces may include the capacity to:

• Regulate emotional states and so improve wellbeing
• Release from habitual ways of thinking; be more creative and think ‘out of the box’.
• Enhance decision making in complex situations
• Improve working memory in stressful environments
• Attune with more empathy to ourselves and others, enhancing employer/employee and client relationships.
• Increase focus and concentration which positively impacts on performance
• Engage more with the task at hand and so increase sense of mastery and job satisfaction

Early adopters
As awareness of the benefits of mindfulness increases, there is an emerging trend of organizations from government, corporates to NGOs offering mindfulness training in their workplaces. These include Google, Apple, Ebay and PriceWaterhouse; also the U.K. National Health Service, U.S. Red Cross, U.S. Marines and British Transport have established mindfulness training programmes, with the latter achieving a 70 % decrease in days off work due to stress, distress and anxiety in one study.