Meditation is not a new practice, but is completely revolutionary in seemingly conflicting contexts, like the corporate world.
In a 2017 study by Academy of Management, researchers found an increase in productivity in those who began a transcendental meditation practice, but it didn’t stop at simply performing at a higher level. Meditators also felt they built better relationships with supervisors and coworkers. They felt more satisfied in their jobs, and a general sense of happiness (I’m not sure how exactly the researchers quantify happiness, but it’s in the report). Numerous reports showed similar results, headlined by improvements in focus, decision-making, and self-discipline.
I began meditating relatively recently as a structured part of my yoga teacher training, and the first time I set a timer for five minutes, it felt like forever. Gradually, as the class went on and I became more adept at sinking in more quickly, meditation became a thing of both respite and rejuvenation: the perfect practice to bring to my corporate job.
Learning more about meditation as something that could help others strengthened my resolve to bring it to my coworkers. In enterprise software, workers don’t have a great track record for work-life balance. High pressure deadlines for code freezes, glorified “crunch” weeks that saw some engineers putting in 60-80 hours at their desks, and catered meals to ensure people wouldn’t want to leave work are the norm. If I can’t change an entire culture, maybe I can help a small culture shift, I thought.
The sessions started small. I came back from maternity leave, not so much rested, but ready to carve out a sliver of sanity among the office workers. A mindfulness group had begun to form, designed by an unpaid intern studying mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). I collaborated with the group to jumpstart a meditation-focused offshoot.
Creating the Case for Meditation
Meet Them Where They Are
I knew the importance of understanding more about my coworkers and their ability to participate in a meditation group. For example, would they prefer to meet in person or online? How much time did they have in their day, and when was the best time to meet? We created a survey asking these questions, and included a call for moderators and specific topics of interest.
The survey response was small, and we even got one response detailing how meditation in the workplace was unprofessional. Undaunted but informed, we started hosting small group sessions with interested people. We scheduled 30-minute blocks of times in the day at times that met the needs of most people (Tuesdays at noon), and developed a consistent group of folks. Keeping the time consistent and sending recurring calendar appointments keeps the sessions top-of-mind for our users without any additional pressure to attend.
And even in this pandemic, remote-working world, we’ve kept the same time blocked off. Attendance changed a bit — people sometimes get too Zoom’ed out to attend yet another Zoom meeting — but numbers stay relatively strong. In the spring, summer, and fall months, we even managed to meet in person a few times for outdoor sessions.
The format for our meditation sessions is consistent, and provides people with the option to move around a bit. We start with a greeting, share news, and do a short, reflective meditation within the first ten minutes. The next ten minutes utilize a little movement. I lean on my yoga teacher training to create a short-themed practice accessible for all mobility levels. Finally, the last ten minutes feature a longer meditation, and a few minutes in silence before closing.
Know Your Audience
Our industry is rational, linear-thinking, and scientific. This isn’t an audience that would be into chanting ‘om’ or Sanskrit verses, so I structure our meditations around ideas that will appeal to them. Bringing scientific justification, like findings on neuroscience and meditation, appeals to folks who might otherwise be naysayers.
In our organization, we use Microsoft Teams for most inter-team communication. By posting some articles on the science of meditation to general channels, people are incentivized to join the listserv and give it a try.
The listserv is our primary source of communication with our audience, in addition to a dedicated Meditation Teams channel. Through this, we send out the monthly recurring Tuesday session invite, and always solicit feedback in the invite, on the Teams channel, and in person when I lead the Tuesday session.
Close the Loop with Results
In our organization, we could meet as a meditation group without formal endorsement. But being a recognized employee resource opens up a budget and resources. In order to achieve this, we needed to show a positive organizational effect generated from the group.
To do this, we did three things:
- Defined the metrics indicating success. We wanted to show our group added positively to the culture, better enabled people to handle stress, enhanced relationships at work , and increased innovation and creativity.
- Collected all the information and data we could find on organizations who supported corporate meditation programs, and whatever metrics they published. From this information, we created benchmark scores around the things we wanted to measure.
- Sent a survey to our meditation listserv that scored the things we wanted to measure.
We’re in the process of scoring our results to compare with the benchmark numbers we collected. So far, we’re exceeding those scores, and are on track to become an officially-recognized employee resource group.
Designing Your Organization’s Meditation Program
If I’ve learned anything about how to create an effective meditation program, it’s to find ways to consistently take the pulse of your organization. As a group, we saw a steep decline when the organization moved to remote work in March 2020, and we spent a lot of time to rebuild the program and find the right tone to attract and retain people. Bringing in the social aspect to start the sessions, followed by movement and the deeper practice, turned our sessions into a communal space. Meditation is no longer just about the practice, but about connection.
Minnnesconsin Yoga offers encouraging, adaptable, alignment-focused yoga classes and workshops in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Lead instructor Meghan Hatalla pulls together elements of different disciplines, aiming to enhance somatic awareness in the body. Meghan completed her 200-hour yoga teacher certification with Maria Toso of Saint Paul Yoga Center, as well as furthered her knowledge with coursework from Jason Crandell, CorePower Yoga (power yoga extensions), and Yoga North (somayoga modalities).
