8 Ways that Mindfulness can Improve the Workplace

There is now a growing body of evidence supporting the application of mindfulness in healthcare contexts. Mindfulness techniques cultivate the human capacity to focus on our present moment experience with openness, curiosity and care. When applied as a form of treatment, it allows the practitioner to become aware of their negative thought patterns and to gain control of them.
Following a series of controlled studies, mindfulness techniques are now recommended by The National Institute for Care and Excellence as a key treatment for depressive-relapse.
The technique can be learned by anyone as a method for controlling the level of stress they experience day to day.
So, what does this have to do with the workplace?
Mindfulness isn’t just about taking time out to meditate from our busy day, it’s about the benefits gained from every individual and team doing this. Its about creating organisational change. When we’re talking about using mindfulness to create positive behavioural change in the workplace, it’s crucial that the whole organisation is bought in. If some individuals or teams don’t take it seriously then relationships don’t change, and the strategic impact is lost.
Many would argue that they are already present and aware a lot of the time, but mindfulness training teaches us to cultivate the technique so that all individuals can switch it on whenever needed.
The Oxford Mindfulness Centre, The London Mindfulness Project and Breathworks are just some of the growing number of organisations out there, offering mindfulness courses for workplaces along with advice on how to achieve buy-in for your specific business context.
In the report ‘Building the Case for Mindfulness in the Workplace’, The Mindfulness Initiative states that mindfulness fundamentally benefits three key areas in the workplace: Wellbeing, Relationships and Performance.
To implement mindfulness into a workplace and achieve buy-in, it’s important to find the benefits that most reflect your organisation’s priorities. I dug a little deeper into the studies informing this report and compiled a list of the different ways that mindfulness can benefit your workplace:
1. Well-being
Mental health issues are now the leading cause of sickness absence in the UK, accounting for 70 million sick days — more than half of the £130 million total every year.
In an increasing knowledge-based economy, human capital is a greater concern for employers, so well-being and resilience building has become a priority. Mindfulness can support resilience by enabling people to become self-aware, so they recognise the signs of stress and respond more efficiently. It also helps individuals to understand the power of thoughts and find new ways to work with them
Several randomised controlled trials of workplace mindfulness-based training courses have found positive effects on burnout, well-being and stress. Studies into mindfulness-training programmes have found these consistently reduce self-reported measures of perceived stress, anger, rumination and physiological symptoms, while improving positive outlook, empathy, sense of cohesion, self-compassion and overall quality of life.
Mindfulness can reduce mental and physical symptoms, which means less expenditure on staff absenteeism.
With reduced stress, a more positive outlook and a cohesive organisation, mindfulness training can enhance job satisfaction and ultimately improve employee retention.
2. Productivity
The ‘attentional crisis’ of the digital age is looming, with studies finding a direct correlation between increased smartphone sales and reduced productivity. Distractions and interruptions are found to consume up to 28% of the average worker’s day, impacting our productivity and focus, and ultimately resulting in substantial business costs.
Mindfulness training improves attention and cognitive abilities. Meditation techniques enable the practitioner to become aware of the wandering mind and to detach from thoughts. Attentional control is a skill that can be learned. Once cultivated, individuals can pay attention to a given task or experience for much longer, which in turn contributes to improved levels of happiness and the ability to ‘think outside the box’. At a time where notifications and emails are constantly demanding our attention, now is an important time for people to learn mindfulness techniques.
3. Creativity and Innovation
Creativity isn’t just for new business ideas or products, it is a useful application in the day to day running of things and enables individuals to think up new approaches that improves tasks or makes them more efficient.
A stressed mind is not conducive to creativity.
MRI scans shows after an eight-week mindfulness course the shrinking of the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with fear and emotion.
With mindfulness training, the practitioner focuses the mind which helps to remove distractions during creative tasks, they observe their own thoughts which activates ‘divergent thinking’, and practice flexible thinking which increases the capacity to respond to situations in different ways, breaking habitual patterns of behaviour.
4. Collective Resilience and Competitive Edge
When people are engaging with mindfulness across the organisation it becomes routine to engage mindfully with one another, creating a mindful culture. Evidence suggests that mindful organisations perform better comparably to other workplaces.
5. Social Relationships
Compassion is the foundation of mindfulness; in fact, without it mindfulness is ineffective. Mindfulness training teaches the practitioner to respond, rather than react to situations and doing so improves communication between individuals. Employees become more collaborative and respond to each other with compassion. Greater collaboration drives productivity, as individuals build trust and learn from one another.
Not only does attending with compassion create healthy minds, it is conducive to a healthy working environment and a resilient workforce.
6. Decision Making
One of the elements of behaviour change that can occur with mindfulness is the ability to become aware of how we as individuals process information. These insights into our automatic responses can help us to shift how we respond or make decisions.
By cultivating our attention, it is suggested that practitioners are more likely to pay attention to what is happening right now without letting past experiences or judgements influence our decisions. Decisions are more likely to be better informed, ethically aware and less prone to confirmation bias.
7. Leadership
Mindful leaders make for mindful organisations. The ability to make better decisions, to collaborate and build resilience are all important practices for effective leaders.
A 2012 study of 96 supervisors, measuring the influence of mindful leaders on employees, found positive impacts on employee work-life balance and reduced employee exhaustion.
8. Self-Awareness
Individuals learn about their own thought patterns and reactive processes, which gives them a new perspective, or an insight into how they can improve their performance.
But self-awareness is also significant at an organisational level. Mindfulness training can help employees and employers to become more aware of problems in the workplace, leading more opportunities for organisations to take action.
