But leaders will only be convinced to introduce programmes if they’re presented with data, Mind & Matter conference hears
Mindfulness training can bring remarkable benefits to employees, including making them more effective workplace learners, according to one of the world’s most eminent researchers of the emerging discipline.
Dr Sara Lazar, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, told the Mind & Matter conference in London that mindfulness could increase both sustained and selected attention, as well as neural efficiency. In just one week, she said, it could positively affect fluid intelligence, which broadly correlates to IQ.
Lazar defined mindfulness as “disengaging from the everyday and paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, without judgement”. As a practice, it incorporates elements of meditation, but is increasingly being synthesised for use in workplace training so stressed-out employees can use it at key moments, often aided by apps.
Harvard studies, she said, suggested that mindfulness had an even more profound effect on the brain than its proponents had ever imagined, including affecting brain matter so that “50-year-olds who meditate had similar performance in their frontal cortex to 25-year-olds”.
After just two months of a mindfulness-based stress reduction programme, participants experienced less mind wandering. They also recorded greater activity in the cerebellum – which is linked to sensory performance – and the left hippocampus, which assists in emotion regulation and learning, which has particularly intriguing implications for L&D professionals looking to help employees increase their capacity for learning. The amygdala, responsible for the ‘fight or flight’ reaction in stressful situations, grew smaller.
But while the scientific case for mindfulness mounts, the conference heard from HR professionals who were navigating the challenges of delivering programmes in cash-strapped and often sceptical working environments. People Management has reported on businesses such as BlueBay Asset Management, which have successfully adopted the practice, but barriers remain elsewhere.
Time is a significant factor for Brett Hartley, senior associate at global law firm Clyde & Co. “We’re very good at offering one-off mindfulness programmes but not so good at the six to eight-week programmes that the evidence says are most effective. I don’t think one-hour or one-day programmes have much benefit beyond getting people initially interested,” he said.
But the intensity of the legal profession lent itself to greater mindfulness, he added: “We measure our time in six-minute units and aim for seven hours of billable time per day – imagine how focused you need to be to get to that point. There’s an opportunity cost to have someone billable offline [taking part in mindfulness training] but there’s also a big gain in having that person more mindful and productive.”
Numerous speakers said senior buy-in was crucial to encouraging employees that mindfulness could genuinely help them do their jobs better. “You can put in lots of training around mindfulness, but without leaders on board it will just be a nice thing people get individual benefit from but doesn’t benefit the whole organisation,” said Helen Wray, health and wellbeing business partner at Mars. “If we want people to leave work with more energy every day, we have to get leaders on board and have them walking the talk.”
For that, she said, you need data: Mars can show that 75 per cent of field sales reps who undertook mindfulness training were still using the tools at least once a day six months later, and that they felt it helped them perform better. Regular ‘energy surveys’ also convinced leaders that they needed to invest in increasing the resilience of their teams, and demonstrate the return on that investment.
Tim Munden, Unilever’s chief learning officer, said a mindfulness programme should be positioned as a wellbeing or leadership initiative, to avoid being seen as “fluffy”. Unilever has introduced it into coaching sessions and encouraged leaders to adopt basic mindful practices such as staying away from phones during meetings, he said. Hartley suggested calling a mindfulness course a way to ‘harness the mind’s potential at work’ or ‘build resilience to enhance performance’.
In one area, however, speakers were in almost complete agreement: while apps might be good for introducing the topic of mindfulness, they do not offer enough substance to truly embed it. Munden said it was hard to get more than 7 per cent of the workforce to use mindfulness apps, whereas other methods reached more, while Hartley added: “Technology often isn’t the answer. I’ve sat through a lot of webinars on mindfulness, but I’m not more mindful as a result. I’m a much bigger fan of face to face.”