There’s a backlash brewing against mindfulness at work.
“Corporations have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon because it conveniently shifts the burden onto the individual employee,” write Ron Purser and David Loy in the Huffington Post. “Stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efficiently and calmly within toxic environments.”
Do such arguments have scientific merit? Or do they throw the mindful baby out with the corporate bath water?
These are questions I explored with speakers and participants at the recent conference Mindfulness & Well-Being at Work, organized at UC Berkeley by the Greater Good Science Center, Mindful magazine, and the 1440 Multiversity.
Researchers, mindfulness teachers, and business experts all seem to agree that red flags go up when corporations start to mess with the minds of their employees.
Many of the people I spoke with agreed that mindfulness programs, which are just starting to get off the ground, have problems—but not, perhaps, the ones cited by critics in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon.com, and elsewhere. Researchers, mindfulness teachers, and business experts all seem to agree that red flags go up when corporations start to mess with the minds of their employees. And yet more and more studies are finding that the training also confers many benefits—not the least of which is a stronger sense of self-control.
“Our brains are always being shaped, wittingly or unwittingly,” said pioneering mindfulness researcher Richard Davidson in his conference keynote. Mindfulness, he said, “is a way of taking responsibility for your own mind.”
What is mindfulness at work supposed to do?
As workplace mindfulness programs, such as SIYLI and the Potential Project, have grown, so has the chorus of criticism. Many of these programs and experimental interventions aim to minimize the time involved. They are moving online, and are trying to shorten the commitment to as little as two weeks or just ten minutes a day. Most focus on stress reduction, building on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s famed and research-tested Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program.
For critics, that’s precisely the problem. On Salon.com, for example, Ronald Purser and Edwin Ng quite reasonably point out that “employee stress is not self-imposed nor due to a lack of mindfulness.” Instead, stress arises from external, often unfair, conditions—such as job insecurity or constant technological change—that mindfulness might only mitigate, or so corporations seem to hope.
The solution, Purser and Ng argue, is to change workplaces, not change yourself. They dismiss the possibility that helping employees to cultivate moment-to-moment awareness might actually help them to change workplaces. Since there’s not yet any evidence that mindfulness could be a “Trojan horse” that will overthrow the corporate order, they argue that:
Mindfulness to individuals in corporations will, at best, offer stress relief or create what [University of New Hampshire media studies professor] Kevin Healy has described as ‘integrity bubbles’ for select individuals, while systemic corporate dysfunction continues unabated.
This, of course, seems to suggest that stress relief is an unworthy goal, and perhaps even a distraction from higher-level systemic changes. In the UK magazine The Conversation, Zoë Krupka goes further, charging that corporations are co-opting mindfulness and turning it into “a simple way to bear the unbearable.”
Her charge is not against mindfulness itself but against quick-and-easy corporate mindfulness. As Krupka writes, “This is perhaps the crux of the problem of the mindless application of Buddhist meditation practice: the marketing of mindfulness as a solution to work stress and life balance rather than the complex spiritual approach to living it is meant to be.”
That is an argument with which Fred Luskin, a therapist and director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, agrees completely.
“There’s an expectation that something that takes decades to develop can be transmitted to a [corporate] culture that has fundamentally different goals,” he told me at the Mindfulness & Well-Being conference. The most important of those goals is, of course, profit.
Indeed, many of the presenters at the conference seemed intent on persuading the audience that mindfulness meditation is good for the bottom line, pointing to a rising number of studies that suggest mindfulness could increase customer happiness, improve decision-making, or build self-confidence in leaders, all of which can theoretically help make the business more successful as a business.
One speaker, Jacqueline Carter, highlighted a benefit I had never even thought of: that mindfulness training can help save lives in certain jobs. We might find it funny to imagine burly carpenters and electricians sitting on cushions with their legs crossed and eyes closed, but in the construction industry, said Carter, the training has a very concrete benefit.
“The biggest reason why accidents happen on [construction] jobs is that people aren’t paying attention,” she said.
Mindful practice, modest goals
This made me realize that some of the high-level criticisms of mindfulness training at work might be missing the point.
Mindfulness might not address workplace inequality and insecurity, as Purser and Ng allege—but is it supposed to? Isn’t it enough to simply integrate decades of insight generated by hundreds of studies into the trainings that are a part of all workplaces, so that employees can benefit in ways that are specific to their industries? If brief training in mindful breathing and body scans helps construction workers stay safe, is that really so bad?
It may also be too much to ask secular mindfulness training on the job to have the same impact as sustained Buddhist meditation practice. One recent study, for example, found that two weeks of workplace training that included reading and 10 minutes of guided meditation led to better sleep quality. Of course, the training isn’t a cure-all—participants “did not demonstrate significant enhancements in their ability to psychologically detach from work,” which was one of the hoped-for results of the training.
A great deal of on-the-job mindfulness training can never be more than a simple teaser for the employee.
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