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.

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.