The following article appeared in last week’s New York Times, with the subhead Human Resources Try On Some New Perks: Meditation, Sound Baths, Energy Consulting and Hypnotherapy. As stated below, with corporate culture taking a more holistic approach to employee well-being, practices once held as bohemian, on society’s fringes, are now going mainstream. But the success of wellness practices also rely on the willingness of employees as well as top leadership to integrate these values into their company culture.
Here at The Higher Haven, we’re organizing more and more corporate gatherings. But you won’t find these retreats open to public registration or on the monthly calendar. Consider with all the current happenings, in the face of potential global pandemics and fearful reactions worldwide, there may be no safer place on the planet then the woods of Western Michigan. And to quote Oprah’s touring meditation teacher Mr. Israel, “In these more traditional spaces where people are not in New York or Los Angeles, they’re starting to open up to this stuff.” For more information on organizing an off-site staff retreat or on-site company workshop, contact us directly. If five deep breaths pre-meeting or an hour de-stress session can help inspire a shift, imagine how more extended time in nature, in silence, and then in community could help your crew.
On a rainy Thursday afternoon, in a plush pink conference room in Manhattan, a group of colleagues formed a meditation circle. As they sat in their own silence, sirens and traffic wailed below. “Bathe in the joy of truly loving yourself,” a former Tibetan Buddhist monk advised them. Over the course of an hour, the participants — co-workers at WayUp, a company that matches employers with recent college graduates and students — were guided through deep breaths, spoke to each other about “flow” and “powerful creative states,” and completed a self-hypnosis exercise. They bonded over their challenges with sleep and overworking. At the end of the session, one employee mentioned his chest feeling less tight; another described a pinch in her back dissipating. “That was awesome,” said Brandon Santulli, the office manager at WayUp. It was his first time meditating. “I feel very energized now,” he said, “and that’s not usually how I feel until I get another cup of cold brew.”
As companies have stressed the importance of work-life balance and mental health, and a younger, more open-minded work force has joined their ranks, wellness initiatives have ramped up in workplaces across the country. These optional activities, often scheduled during company hours, include basic meditation and yoga, as well as vision-boarding (creating a collage essentially), energy consulting, sound baths and hypnotherapy. They are meant to be restorative and instructive, without veering too didactic. And they’re not peculiar to millennial-led start-ups: Multinational corporations, restaurant owners and federal government agencies are among the employers calling for more wellness in the workplace. “No one wants to sit down for an hour and be lectured about stress management,” said Cassandra Bianco, the founder of Wellbeings, a network of corporate wellness consultants who, in addition to leading the meditation workshop at WayUp, have performed cacao ceremonies for Spotify and hosted an intuitive eating course at the Wing. “They want to sit for an hour and feel de-stressed.” The ultimate purpose is to encourage a corporate culture that takes a more holistic approach to employee well-being and embraces imperfection in the daily grind. “I’ve seen firsthand what five deep belly breaths before a meeting can do,” Ms. Bianco said.
Sometimes wellness experts are called upon in moments of crisis. Last fall, Jesse Israel, a meditation teacher who is currently on tour with Oprah and whose clients include Coca-Cola and Ford, was brought in by a “big retailer that recently went bankrupt,” he said, to lead a session during an annual companywide meeting. “The employees were really freaked out about their future, there was a really heavy energy in the room and the company was really going through it,” Mr. Israel said. “I did a keynote talk about toxic stress and stress culture, and I led a meditation.” During the session, he recalled, the owner of the company “got so deep in the meditation that the C.E.O. had to go over to him and shake him when the time was done because his body was so exhausted by what he was going through.” Exhaustion, Mr. Israel said, is a common affliction among employees. “What I see more than anything is the pathway to burnout,” he said. “People know that they’re stressed and they don’t do anything about it.”
‘A Band-Aid Over a Gaping Wound’
A common criticism of workplace wellness programs is that they offer a superficial solution to more deeply rooted institutional problems, including a 24/7 work culture, unmanageable workloads and unpredictable schedules. Most wellness programs have “limited if any effectiveness,” Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, wrote in an email. In virtually every aspect of life, including employee health and medical interventions, “prevention is almost always much more effective, and cost effective, than treatment,” he said. On the other hand, wellness practices in a workplace setting may also be the only place where employees have access to them, said Monica Worline, a research scientist at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford. Dr. Worline, who is also the chief executive of EnlivenWork, a company aimed at improving workplaces through research-based tools developed by academics, said there is mixed evidence on the efficacy of workplace wellness programs. More recent research, according to her, tends to deal with “the teaching of mindfulness, meditation and other techniques that help people in work settings to calm down their minds and refocus their attention.”
Another trap many organizations fall into is believing that the introduction of a mindfulness program can make up for significant underinvestment or inattention to employees’ actual working conditions, Dr. Worline said. She recalled visiting a “major hospital system” to help with a unit of doctors who were dealing with an increasing error rate in their work. After she ran a session for the team focused on compassion and “restoring meaning to medicine,” she discovered that the unit was short seven staffers and many employees were working double shifts. “They very rightly said to me, ‘You could sit here and talk to us about compassion all day long, it’s not going to make a difference in our stress levels,’” Dr. Worline said. “No wellness management is going to work until you fix the working conditions for people there. In that case, wellness programs were a Band-Aid over a gaping wound.”
Still, Mr. Israel, the meditation expert, is confident that as stress levels in the workplace increase, so will the demand for this kind of programming. Last year, at a hospitality design conference in Hollywood, Fla., he presented in front of hundreds of people from the industry. “Ninety-five percent of the people in the room had never meditated or done any of this before, and it was risky for the organizer to book me, but people loved it,” he said. “In these more traditional spaces where people are not in New York or Los Angeles, they’re starting to open up to this stuff.” And through these sessions, some of them are finding practices they can replicate on a more regular basis. Mr. Santulli, the office manager at WayUp, said he would look into hosting a weekly mindfulness session for the whole staff. “Stress and anxiety has been a big part of our life, and everything gets overwhelming sometimes,” he said. “This was the first time in a long time that I let go of this list of things I have to do, even for a moment.”
