The benefits of mindfulness & meditation in the workplace

Personally, I have now been practicing mindfulness & daily meditation for over 10 years.  I am often asked “what are the top 4 things for your health & energy?” and these always include mindfulness & meditation, along with great sleep, great nutrition and morning exercise.

In 2014, energiseYou celebrates its 10^th year in helping companies to improve the health, energy & performance of their employees.  For almost a decade we have brought mindfulness & meditation into the workplace via our workshops, webinars, podcasts & health events.

That aside, I have observed a very interesting polarity with this subject. On one hand, there are so many amazing benefits associated with mindfulness & meditation, such as:

-       Improves happiness

-       Increases your energy levels

-       Improves sleep

-       Makes you more successful in business

-       Helps you manage pressure at work

-       Improves problem solving & creativity

-       Lowers blood pressure & boosts the immune system

-       Reduces negative emotions, stress, anxiety, fear and anger

Yet, on the other hand, there are so few people that actually practice mindfulness & meditation on a daily basis.

So given all of these benefits why is it not practiced more? Here are some of the reasons:

-       People and companies are not fully aware of its transforming benefits

-       Some of these benefits cannot be fully appreciated until they are personally experienced

-       People often expect to be able to quieten the mind and meditate like a Buddhist monk on day one, which just doesn’t happen

-       People often try meditation without being shown how, find it very hard and then immediately give up

-       People often over look mindfulness as a practice because it seems too basic and simple, yet it is in its simplicity that the magic lies.

-       As with many things, people need to be inspired by someone to start.  My personal inspiration to start TM meditation was the film director David Lynch who has been meditating everyday for the past 35 years and he’s still loving it!

So the reasons that mindfulness & meditation should be a key part of your wellbeing programme are because of their profound benefits that can transform overall health & energy. To achieve this we need to address the challenges in the list above to ensure we can actively and regularly embrace the gift of mindfulness & meditation into our lives.

Energy management in the workplace

A recent YouGov survey of over 2,000 employees, commissioned by Lucozade Revive, finds nine out of ten of us suffer with a dip in energy in the afternoon. This afternoon energy slump equates to a shocking 24 days in lost productivity per year per employee. 

These two findings really show the benefits that can be gained from improved energy management, for both employers and individuals themselves.

A couple of months ago I was asked by Lucozade Revive to chair their Energy Management Summit. The panel discussed energy management in the workplace and the role employers should play in helping their staff achieve high energy.

The conclusion following the summit is that there are three huge benefits linked to improved energy management within our organisations:

        Employees achieve a better quality life 

      They are not only much happier but their performance at work improves as a result.

      Improved organisational performance 

      Sickness absence reduces, reactive healthcare costs drop and employee performance improves.

Less pressure on the NHS 

      Energy management is directly linked to health, when energy improves our health also improves.  Healthy people put less strain on the NHS, which currently costs the UK £109 billion per year.

To find out how you can help your staff beat the 3pm working slump click here. 

Workers are suffering with poor energy – why?

Research, from energiseYou, shows the large majority of UK workers score just 30-40% on the key drivers of good health and energy.

We now live in a 24/7 world and these things are just some of key changes that are causing us to feel drained or low in energy: 

Nutrition

Our nutritional habits have changed over the last ten years, quite often for the worse. E.g. More processed food, less nutrients in our food

Lack of movement

We are now much more sedentary at work and at home

Approach to work

The way we work now. E.g. Dealing with everything as if it’s urgent, lots of task swapping

Pressure

The sheer pressure people are under

Technology

The excessive technology we are exposed to

Hyper-thinking syndrome

We can get so busy problem solving that thinking takes over our awareness, and we lose our sense of the here and now – this is a common problem

Work-life balance

In today’s 24/7 working world many of us find a blur between work and home, leaving us working too many evenings and weekends and quite often not taking a real break

Lack of sleep

With new technology new information is being delivered to us all the time. Our nervous system is quite often being over stimulated and this is negatively affecting our sleep

The modern world is having a negative impact on our energy and this is just going to get progressively worse unless we take action now. Take action today – to find out what you can do click here to contact one of the energiseYou team  

Positivity is central to success

It can be difficult to remain positive when something goes wrong or you experience a setback. But being optimistic and taking a positive approach to how you deal with challenges is central to success.

In a world where change is constant it is only natural that we face challenges along the way, inside and outside work. These may appear to have a negative impact on circumstances/things around us but it is how we deal with them and move on that will determine the real impact.

Listen to any great leader and you will hear them talk about the little (and sometimes quite big) setbacks that they have experienced along their road to success. One thing they all have in common is that they don’t dwell on these setbacks or consider them ‘problems’, they focus on addressing them and then quickly move on.

Follow in the footsteps of the likes of Richard Branson and Steve Jobs – acknowledge mistakes, learn from them, make relevant changes and then move on. The moving on part is crucial and it is often this that so many people find impossible to do.

But dwelling on what’s gone wrong all the time and taking a negative approach to things around us or setbacks that we experience could leave us stuck, unable to move. This will not only get us down it will get everyone down around us.

Negativity feeds negativity and this is dangerous in the workplace. Because it not only has an impact on how we feel as individuals but it can lead to low employee engagement levels, poor productivity, an increase in sickness absence and high staff turnover. Positivity, on the other hand, builds successful organisations. It creates an engaged and high performing workforce.

So, how do we encourage our people to focus on the positive?

We need to ensure the culture supports this positive approach. This means making sure that our leaders and managers create a positive working environment for their teams, where people can talk openly about mistakes and learn from them but also where people are encouraged to share successes and build on what is good.

Doing this will not just influence how we feel, but also how we perform, individually and as teams. The more we are able to move our attention to what makes us feel good, the more able we will be able to deal with challenges that come along our way.

Creating an environment that builds on positive emotions can build the pathway to success. To find out more click here to register to listen to our free webinar on the 21 August, at 12pm – I will be joined by Chris Samsa, Positive Psychologist, from the NeuroLeadership Group, to discuss the power of positivity in boosting performance. 

Healthy eating needs to be on every employer's agenda

What does good nutrition and healthy eating have to do with employers? Is it really our responsibility to educate staff about healthy eating?

There is a lot of debate about whose role it is to educate people about their health. But the best companies know that a healthy workforce means a healthy business.

According to our recent poll 100 per cent of HR professionals believe nutrition has an impact on the performance of their workforce.

With 100 per cent of the food that we eat affecting our health, energy and performance at work it makes good business sense for employers to support their staff to make healthy choices. 

The challenge for many employers is that they just don’t know where to start...

It is really quite simple. Essentially employers need to do two key things: 

1. Educate employees  
Give employees the tools to achieve a balanced diet. This means educating them so that they understand what a balanced diet is for them and how to achieve it - we work with lots of organisations to do this by delivering regular health related workshops, webinars and events.

2. Make sure healthy food is easy to access and not too expensive 
Where possible include healthy options for staff – if you have a canteen work with your caterers to include healthy options.  

If you have vending machines either remove them or ensure they are filled  with healthy snacks, ensure water is readily available and try to opt for healthy snacks, food and drink during meetings.

It is simple really. If employees are not eating a healthy diet and getting all the essential nutrients they need then they will end up feeling low in energy and will be unable to perform at their best. 

To find out more click here to listen to our recent webinar: How modern day nutrition is affecting your workforce

When the going gets tough the tough get going

As employers we rely on our people to succeed. Yes, we need a sound business offering – great products and services – but we also need great employees to deliver top services and develop innovative products.

Let's face it, in the current economic climate the large majority of organisations are operating with a relatively tight budget and a slimmed down workforce. So when the work picks up or large projects come in it is not uncommon for us to rely on our employees to have to pick up extra slack until we can justify the extra head count.

At times like this we need to be able to rely on our people to take a ‘can-do’ and ‘will-do’ approach and it is our strong and engaged employees that will work hard to meet this challenge.

Why? Because engaged employees value their organisations and therefore are generally more motivated to put in the extra effort and want to support the organisation when things get tough. However, they can only do this to the best of their ability if they are in good health and have the resilience skills to withstand pressure.

So if we are to rely on our employees to get going when things get tough or a little difficult we need to ensure that they are not only engaged but also healthy and able to withstand the pressure.

What does this mean in practice? Employee engagement does provide some of the answers in terms of motivating staff and improving performance but it doesn’t provide all of them. Employee wellbeing needs to be firmly on the agenda – organisations need to prioritise and invest in the health of their workforce, putting interventions in place to support their wellbeing.

Investing in the health of your staff is not only good for employee wellbeing but it is good for business. 

Employers need to focus more on the positives

The large majority of us tend to focus on what is wrong in our lives, both at home and in the workplace. This needs to change if we are to be successful in creating a positive working environment where people are able to achieve their potential.

Think about what your leaders and managers focus the majority of their time on. You will probably find they give more time and attention to problems, rather than focusing on the positive things that are happening within their team and organisation. For example, managers tend to focus more time on what employees are not doing or what is not being done properly instead of sharing all the positive things that have been achieved.

This happens naturally and is what our mind is trained to do. Think about the ‘fight or flight’ response, our body's automatic response prepares us to fight or run from danger or a threat. But times have changed. We don’t need to be on the look-out for danger in the same way we did years ago.

It is important to remember that problems create problems and therefore focusing all of our attention on what is wrong will have a detrimental effect on business and our employees. It creates a ball of negative energy that just attracts more of the same.

This negative focus will eventually lead to a hostile working environment and a disengaged workforce, which will have a negative impact on both productivity and the happiness of our employees.

It’s time for leaders and managers to take a stand. We need to focus on what is positive within our organisation and training our people to do the same. By this I don’t mean we should ignore problems, I simply mean we need to turn most of our attention to what is good and build on this.

This is not easy and our mind will quite often naturally default back to focus on problems and negative things that surround us. It will take time but this shift needs to happen if we are going to attract and retain the best people and succeed as organisations.

Mind management is at the heart of everything we do.  Crack this, and everything else becomes easy.

Click here for more information about our mind management workshops.