Bringing Mindfulness to Work: Top Companies and Leaders Share Key Results and Learnings at the Mindful Leader Summit
I had such an inspiring time in Washington DC at the Mindful Leader Summit in October, where we talked about bringing mindfulness in the workplace, impact of mindful leadership, practical aspects of creating a culture of wellness across all industries and how it can lead to both corporate and personal success. Here’s my top 8 takeaways from the conference:
- Mindfulness is becoming mainstream: Top companies already prioritize and implement mindfulness or mental fitness training for employees and treat it same as investment in learning and development training. Some of the inspiring examples include Google, Toyota Motor Corporation, SXSW, Boeing, Lender Toolkit, Schlumberger, Humana, Nike and more.
- Mindfulness is backed by neuroscience, but data is not easily accessible. There is already a lot of stats coming from the neuroscience and clinical research on the benefits of mindfulness training (including meditation and other contemplative practices.) But many still see it as too “Woo Woo” to be part of workplace mental health and well-being. One thing we can do to change it is by answering the ultimate “why is it important for me do this” question. For example, by sharing what the evidence is, more education on how brain works and neuroscience behind stress reduction.
“Our entire organization is operating on ancient tech that spends most of the time scanning for threats,” Deb Smolensky, SVP Global Well-Being at NFP.
“Brains are not designed to make us happy they are designed to make us safe,” Clif Smith, corporate mindfulness expert & former Mindfulness Lead at Ernst & Young.
3. Mindfulness aligns beautifully with business goals (OKRs). Can mindfulness training increase profit? How to measure the impact? What are the right metrics to measure it anyway? Most of us striving to implement mindfulness programs in workplace don’t yet have a clear vision on defining what success looks like and key results to measure and demonstrate ROI. In fact, evaluating the impact of such programs was one of the most frequently raised questions at the summit. The short answer from all of the content and conversations at the summit is creating a culture of well-being leads to better ROI.
But we live in the data-driven world and need to be able to demonstrate tangible impact. Some of the key metrics the companies that have seen success with mindfulness training include increases in employee achievement, employee retention and engagement, stress reduction, lower burnout and more effective team communication, especially in remote-friendly companies. Developing a mindful corporate culture facilitates a smarter, happier and more productive workplace. There’s a prerequisite for it to work: it must be aligned with core company values.
4. The workplace is evolving as central community. As joining clubs, churches & organizations fades, the workplace becomes the place of belonging. A brilliant example of building a deep sense of belonging around shared purpose and values is Humana’s 8-week mindfulness pilot that turned it into a sanctuary for employees and proved that honest conversations, creating bonds among coworkers and personal growth can lead to corporate success, spearheaded by Humana’s health educators Skylar Griessel and Shamayne Olivia Kotfas.
5. The role of leadership, EQ and permission to feel. “I have never met a leader who failed due to the lack of IQ. Rather they lack emotional intelligence. Leadership is all about serving other people. It’s about coaching people and challenging them to reach their full potential, because if they do your company will flourish,” Bill George, Harvard Business School Professor, former CEO of Medtronic.
Many studies have shown that EQ is the one of the most important qualities for effective leadership. Yet there’s a lack of mindfulness training that operationalizes emotional intelligence: before we can understand the emotions of others we need to learn to understand and regulate our own emotions first.
Marc Brackett, the Founder & Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, talked about the results of a study with 15,000 people that showed a direct correlation between a leaders EQ and key outcomes. Leaders with higher emotional awareness had significant positive impact on their own and their team’s turnover, job satisfaction, burnout, fear of speaking up, engagement and climate at work. One of my favorite sessions at the summit!
People get the need to slow down, they don’t know how or they don’t always give themselves permission to self care. It is up to leaders to hold space for that, to allow the appropriate time and place to meditate, pause, breathe or whichever format that might look like at any given organization. Then it is up to individual to use the tools and take responsibility. One of the “DOs” of implementing mindfulness is to treat it as an invitation to self discovery — cannot be mandated or legislated. Inclusion and belonging will follow.
I recall the “Serenity Room” we had at the Reef HQ in Carlsbad CA, a cozy quiet space with cushions and comfy chairs tucked away upstairs where everybody could step in for 10–15 minutes and take a mindful moment during the day.
6. First step in getting started with mindfulness at work is an invitation: meet people where they are and show them the why and how.
Rich Fernandez, CEO at Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute inspired all of us with his talk in which he shared how they first started with mindfulness training at Google. Apparently, nobody wanted it — engineers in particular — when they first introduced mindfulness at the tech giant. So they offered it in a way that spoke to the technical people — Neuro Self-Hacking! “We told them we have a way to refactor the brain — and they came for the neuro-hacking, but stayed for mindfulness. That created the ground swell in the organization: people started to show up and we started measuring,” Rick pointed out in his talk. His team pulsed participants on trust in leadership among other things. The results showed it was different than normative population, statistically much higher, in fact. There was an increase in engagement, decrease in absenteeism, which led to statistically significant double-digit increases in ROI.
7. How to begin a mindfulness program in your workplace: start small and measure the impact. Thrive @Boeing launched with only three mindfulness practitioners and has been running company-wide for a few years now. The initial investment went to buy plane tickets to fly to Google and Intel to benchmark against them and learn how they implemented it since they were so successful in it.
Marie-Isabelle Fleuri, Mindfulness Practice Manager at SLB, initiated a small, grassroots workplace mindfulness program that expanded company-wide within just one year.
A remote-friendly fintech startup Lender Toolkit created a culture of wellness remotely within 1.5 years starting with just two 30-minute guided meditations per week. According to Kendyl Morris who carved out the time from her busy day as a project manager to implement mindfulness for her team, and saw a 78% reduction in stress in participants and 72% participation.
8. The rise of neurotech. The least explored but one of the most intriguing topics in the future of mindfulness. With the increasing need for mental wellness, the interest in new tools and technology that can help facilitate immersive intelligent experiences and measure what mindfulness practices are actually doing to our brains and bodies — is also growing fast.
To name a few inspiring developments in the field: I had the pleasure of speaking with Jack Abbott and Emiliana Rodríguez, the founders of JoyXR, the world’s first meta-wellness VR platform helping teams cultivate positive mindset and enhance learning.
Galea’s newest and most advanced VR Headset with neurotech is set to launch in 2023 and the first batches already sold out despite the hefty price tag of over $22,000. It will be the first VR device that measures not only the user’s brain, but also their skin, eyes, muscles, and heart — all at the same time.
The Muse® by Interaxon Inc. EEG meditation and sleep headband uses biofeedback to respond to the user’s mind, heart and breath with the purpose to help you stay calm and focused.
Excited to see what’s next in the mindfulness movement supercharged by tech and science!
#mindfulness #mindfulleader #emotionalintelligence #wellbeingatwork #neuroscience #meditation #selfawareness #corporatedevelopment #growth #changemanagement #changemakers
Connect: https://mymeditatemate.com/
Instagram: @meditate_mate
Listen to my meditations: https://insighttimer.com/meditatemate
