What are Corporate Meditation Programs?
Corporate Meditation Programs can be keynote lectures, multiple seminars, interactive workshops or retreats. They may take place in the office or offsite. They include a mix of mindfulness and meditation training, as well as instruction on what to expect when meditating, insights into the nature of the mind, the root causes of stress, and the best ways to alleviate stress.
Beyond stress, corporate meditation programs show employees and executives alike how to be more present, mindful, communicate more clearly, how to hack into our creativity and focus, generate more energy and productivity, and how to find more fulfillment, purpose and peace.
Through a combination of speaking, guided meditation, and group exercises, companies can expect progress and growth in numerous areas of their business, including a better work-life balance, better group dynamics and better job satisfaction.
There may be no other place in the U.S. that needs corporate meditation programs more than New York City. New York City is the most overworked, overstressed, highest-paced city in the country. Add to that the fact that it probably has fewer green spaces and trees than nearly any other city of its size and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
A happy employee is a good employee, and that’s why it’s also good for the bottom line too. From the highest executives in the boardroom to the hard workers in the mailroom, everyone can benefit from meditation. Corporate meditation benefits businesses enormously.
Work is a stressful place for many people. Even if you’re not aware of the stress, it can manifest in ways ranging from back and neck pain to anger, high blood pressure to trouble sleeping, depression to addiction, even heart attacks, and cancer.
Here, I’ll go over the 8 benefits corporate meditation can boost a company’s profits and office morale.
Corporate Meditation Benefit #1: Less Stress, Anxiety, and Depression
Tiny amounts of stress occasionally are normal and healthy. Small stresses can let us know when something is important, like a deadline. They can let us know when to make urgent changes. And they can let us know when threats or dangers are nearby, like hostile takeovers or spying competitors.
But when these stressors are ongoing and we don’t give our bodies time to heal and recover, that’s when problems spring up. When the brain perceives a threat (which is more often than not just work pressure or even traffic), it responds by preparing to run away or fight. Blood flows to the extremities, blood pressure and heart rate are elevated, and adrenaline is pumping. We are ready for battle.
In the office though, we don’t fight or take flight. We just sit there in this agitated state. Our bodies never release these physiological changes and we accumulate the damage. Stress often leads to anxiety, and chronic stress is what leads to depression. We become quicker to anger and lose our temper.
What Happens When You Meditate?
In meditation, we release the stress by letting our bodies enter a deeply relaxed state of being. Our body un-tenses, our minds unwind, our heart and breathing slowly back down. This is a very healing process.
Additionally, meditation transforms the way workers view stress. Instead of seeing stress as, “Oh no! Why is this happening to me?!” we learn to just observe stressful situations as they are without ego or judgment. We just watch them come as the observer rather than as the recipient of stressful circumstances and then calmly figure out the best course of action to take. In this way, new stressors no longer generate the same stress response in our bodies.
I don’t have to tell you that an office full of stressed, anxious, depressed, worried, fearful employees is not conducive to the best workplace dynamics. It’s bad for morale, it’s bad for employee retention, and an office full of people ready to fight or flight is a powder keg just waiting to blow. De-stressing is one of many benefits of corporate meditation.
A study by Deloitte Consulting found that the cost of losing an employee can be 1.5x to 2x the employee’s salary.
According to the WHO, depression, and anxiety cost the global economy $1 trillion a year in lost productivity.
The American Institute of Stress found U.S. businesses lose $300 billion annually due to workplace stress.
Corporate Meditation Benefit #2: Boosts Energy
Workers can only perform their best when they’ve had a good rest. A groggy employee who stares at their computer screen not doing anything is of no help to anyone.
Stress can often lead to difficulty sleeping. But not only that, humans weren’t designed to work in an office for 8 hours straight. Hence, the coffee break and that 2:30pm sluggish feeling.
Luckily, meditation has not only been proven to help with sleep, but it also gives the brain a rest if done in the middle of the workday and that can lead to an immense natural boost in energy. Imagine a quick power nap on steroids.
When we meditate, we practice being present and allowing our bodies to relax and our minds to quiet. As one of the benefits of corporate meditation, it helps us stop overthinking that often prevents sleep, and it creates a deeply restful and relaxing experience so the meditator can return to work more awake and alert.
According to the National Safety Council, fatigue alone is responsible for costing employers $136 billion a year!
Corporate Meditation Benefit #3: Improves Creativity
Meditation frees the mind to think in new and different ways, which is the secret to creative problem-solving.
Studies show that what prevents creativity is our habitual thinking because we’re just thinking the same old thoughts in the same old thought patterns and we cannot break out of it to find a new and innovative solution.
By practicing mindfulness meditation, study participants were able to reduce the chatter in their minds, increase their nonconceptual awareness, and were able to discover new insights into problems they were given to solve.
Our entire economy is driven by innovation. It’s no wonder Apple, Google, HBO, Nike and so many other innovative Fortune 500 companies offer free meditation classes and courses to their employees.
Path to Peace with Todd Perelmuter Newsletter
Corporate Meditation Benefit #4: Better Physical Health for Employees and Executives
Meditation isn’t only good for the mind. It eases chronic pain, improves the heart and cardiovascular system, boosts the immune system, and even resolves pregnancy problems.
Meditation also helps with cancer symptoms and treatment side effects, the symptoms of menopause, and dealing with IBS.
The reason meditation works are because of our bodies’ autonomic nervous system—the system that regulates our bodily functions, such as heart rate, digestion, breathing, and so on. This system is made up of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS).
The SNS is the “fight or flight” system. It is activated when we are stressed. For many humans who don’t do much fleeing or fighting, it is always activated.
The PNS is a “rest and digest” system. When this state is activated, it allows the body to relax, heal and recover from pathogens and injuries.
Meditation activates the PNS almost immediately. This allows for the stress in our muscles and body to become released, tension to disappear, heart health to improving, our immune systems to become strengthened, and our bodies to heal and recover much more quickly.
Forbes has reported that worker illness costs the U.S. economy $576 billion a year. Making a small investment into helping your company’s workers develop a daily meditation practice can pay off tenfold and your business benefits from corporate meditation.
Corporate Meditation Benefit #5: Leads to Better Focus and Concentration
At the root of it, mindfulness meditation is the training of the mind to focus and concentrate. In meditation, we practice focusing on one thing: either your breath, your body, or a mantra. This practice in single-pointed focuses becomes an invaluable skill throughout a meditator’s life.
It’s easy to focus when you’re watching your favorite movie, but it can be extremely difficult when you’ve got a million TPS reports to go through. We live in an age of microscopic attention spans and ADHD diagnoses. Fortunately for us, the age-old practice of meditation provides a natural and effective cure for that.
According to a Udemy report, 70% of workers report being distracted at work and that training could help. Remarkably, the average employee reports that up to 40% of the workday is nonproductive. As reported in Business News Daily, $650 billion is lost annually due to distracted workers.
Corporate Meditation Benefit #6: Better Learning and Memory
Employees with better functioning brains lead to a better functioning business. We all know we should be working smarter, not harder. But how do you achieve that?
Harvard published an article about a study that found just 8 weeks of mindfulness meditation led to increased gray matter density in the hippocampus, the area of the brain known to be important for learning and memory.
An article from Wired titled, Business Success Requires Memory, points out that memory is the cornerstone of intelligence. While we can’t all be Ray Dalio, the billionaire investor and daily meditator, meditation can help all of us reach our full potential.
Corporate Meditation Benefit #7: Leads to Fewer Costly Mistakes
Many people think that stress is a great motivator, but numerous scientific studies all show the same thing: stress causes people to make mistakes.
In business, these mistakes cost money. In stock trading, this is the clearest because we literally call a big mistake on a massive scale a “panic,” which inevitably leads to trillions of dollars in lost value.
When we’re fearful and stressed, we cannot assess situations accurately. We see everything—even our coworkers—as a threat, ignore important cues, make hasty and impulsive decisions, and hurt our workplace relationships. An estimate by F1F9 found that 88% of all spreadsheets have errors in them and 50% have material defects.
With the benefits of corporate meditation, we clear our minds so that we can see things more clearly. We become more mindful about what we are doing and we are better able to avoid costly mistakes related to stress.
In 2012, an employee at JP Morgan made a copy-and-paste spreadsheet error that cost the company $6 billion in trading loss.
According to a Columbia University study, doctors in operating rooms make up to 66% more mistakes on patients during times of stress.
Corporate Meditation Benefit #8: Leads to More Productivity
Distractions, stress, poor health, and lack of focus all mean one thing: unproductive. With smartphones and social media, almost half of the workday goes to waste for the average worker.
Let’s stop wasting 3 hours and 12 minutes a day being distracted. Instead, let’s spend just 20 minutes meditating to help recharge the batteries, improve focus, help with creativity, relieve stress, think clearly, and get more done in the same amount of time.
The ADAA has found 56% of workers say productivity is the thing most affected by stress and anxiety.
According to findings by AOL and Salary.com, wasted time at works costs U.S. companies $759 billion a year.
We no longer live in an age where strength and brute force dominate the world. With nothing more than his mind, Stephen Hawking was able to travel to the beginning of time and through black holes, surviving to report back to us what he found. The human mind is the most important resource a company can have.
If you are still not convinced, just ask daily meditators like Ray Dalio (Founder of Bridgewater Associates), Jack Dorsey (CEO of Square Payments and Twitter), Jeff Weiner (CEO of LinkedIn), Oprah, Rupert Murdoch, Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Lucas, Paul McCartney, Jerry Seinfeld, or even the employees at Facebook or Google, who have all recognized the benefits of meditation.
At EastWesticism, we offer a variety of custom corporate solutions, from corporate mindfulness workshops aimed at reducing work stress, sick days, and employee turnover rates, to leadership meditative sessions designed to enhance decision-making. For more information, visit this page.
