What is a Mindful Business?
It’s about changing the world one business at a time
Mindfulness seems to be taking the world by storm, and none too soon. With the pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine, the overall sour mood and stress levels of the world have risen astronomically. Mindfulness and mindfulness meditation can help address this — not only as individuals but organizationally.
For me personally, being mindful has helped anchor me in calm during the current chaos. It helps me be more focused, perform work more quickly and effectively, and be more creative and empathetic. It also helps me look at issues from the other person’s perspective. This makes me a more effective team member and a better person.
Mindfulness has also opened me up to a fuller notion of choice, and how my choices then impact my organization.
According to mindfulness guru Jack Kornfield, the pandemic has provided us with an inflection point:
Epidemics are a part of the cycle of life on this planet, the choice is how we respond. With greed and hatred and fear and ignorance? Or with generosity, clarity, and love?
Businesses both large and small face the same question, but with a slightly different spin. They have an overarching set of choices that require them to address issues that can mean the difference between survival and failure at an organizational level.
How can mindfulness help?
According to Heather Gwaltney, Founding CEO of the Center for Mindful Business:
A mindful business practices systemic wellness so they can achieve sustainable results. With the ‘Great Resignation’ at hand, extreme stress, burnout, and loss of customer loyalty, it’s important now more than ever to pay attention to the wellbeing of employees and overall health and wellness of the business. Studies also show that organizations that practice Social Responsibility and Triple Bottom Line initiatives perform up to three times better financially than their competitors. This growing trend proves that organizations ‘do well by doing good’.
Mindful leaders also take time to reflect on their own relationship with work and staff by first and foremost not treating their people like machines. According to Gwaltney, studies reveal several success factors of a mindful business leader:
Successful leaders have ‘breakthrough thinking’ and place emphasis on opportunities rather than solving problems. Even though proper task-management is important, they focus first on interpersonal relationships, effective communication, and training and development.
Today’s business environment requires fundamental changes to the way employers approach their staff and other stakeholder groups. We are in the midst of a labor crisis and the answer may not be that labor and management devolve into increasingly adversarial relationships, but instead, realize they are mutually dependent.
Moreover, the pandemic has brought work from home (WFM) strategies to the mainstream and in many settings is creating a new, perhaps even long-lasting, work culture.
According to Matthew Kerzner of EisnerAmper:
Employee engagement should be an integral part of any organization’s strategic plan. This is especially important now as leaders try to understand both their employees’ and their customers’ needs in a temporary (and possibly permanent) work-from-home (WFH) culture.
An emphasis on employee wellness, increased employee engagement, not treating their people like machines, and realizing that labor and management are interdependent — all of this require businesses to rethink their approach to their employees in a more mindful and holistic way.
The need is a pressing one. According to the World Economic Forum:
There is an urgent need for organizations to venture beyond traditional norms and explore creative solutions to support the workforce effectively. This includes developing and adopting a framework that is grounded in compassion, holistic wellness, meaningful interactions, and flexibility.
The pandemic has also brought mental health issues to the fore. Employee wellness issues under COVID-19 have forced employers to deal straight on with both the physical and emotional problems of their staff. A key problem has to do with isolation — a problem that will continue as WFM policies remain in place. But this very issue also holds the seed of a mindful opportunity.
Mindfulness meditation is a proven way to deal with employee stress and opens up avenues for employees to connect through group meditation. Study after study has shown that a staff trained in mindfulness meditation has a lowered stress level and a higher degree of effectiveness and emotional resilience. Mindfulness meditation techniques help people be more focused and ‘in the moment’ with their tasks and perform them much more efficiently and confidently. The success of mindfulness apps such as Calm and Headspace underscore this point. Mindfulness meditation groups over Zoom can also help forge employee connections and perhaps even be led by their managers.
But the need for businesses to be more mindful doesn’t end with their employees. The environment must also be considered mindfully.
Strained relations between labor and management, caused in part by inflation that forces labor to demand higher wages, can often find businesses putting their environmental concerns on the back burner.
But most of us understand at this point that in addition to the economic pressures wrought by the pandemic, we are still in the midst of a climate crisis as well as overall environmental degradation.
Interestingly, the pandemic enables people to think more holistically and mindfully about how their businesses approach the environment. One obvious example is how WFM strategies can help reduce carbon emissions and also minimize the time wasted in commutes. Perhaps time formerly spent commuting can be devoted to employee wellness and online mindfulness meditation sessions.
The bottom line is that while businesses are facing a variety of pressures, they cannot lose sight of their need to maintain both their environmental responsibilities and good employee relations and communication. This can be done by providing their people with the mindful tools necessary to deal effectively with WFM culture, isolation, emotional stress, and other realities introduced by the pandemic that will linger in a post-pandemic world.
In addition, environmental concerns must still be tackled in order to ensure we sustain that world into the future through mindful consideration of the environmental footprint of businesses. As Joe Biden says, we need to ‘Build Back Better’ — in my opinion, that means building back mindfully.
Mindfulness and mindfulness meditation techniques, when used within the workplace in a way that holistically understands the interdependent nature of labor and management, is a high priority need that most businesses can and should benefit from.
Companies such as Goldman Sachs, Google, General Mills, and Nike are leading the way by introducing mindfulness into the workplace. Google is well known for being carbon neutral since 2007. Start-ups and medium-sized businesses will want to take up the mindfulness task as well; it is a matter of well-being and survival whose time has come for wide adoption.
By D. R. Thompson — D.R. (Don) Thompson is an essayist and award-winning social-impact film producer. He is also a founding partner with the Center for Mindful Business.
References
Things Keep Getting Scarier, an interview with Jack Kornfield, by David Marchese, The New York Times, April 15, 2020
Center for Mindful Business, Heather Gwaltney, CEO, April 2022
Reconciling Management Styles and Employee Engagement in a WFH setting, by Matthew R. Kerzner, Ph.D., August 11, 2020
Why Companies Must Prioritize Wellness in the Workplace, by Amanda Puravankara, World Economic Forum, October 10, 2021
Three Research-Backed Benefits of Mindfulness at Work, by Jeremy Adam Smith, Mindful, April 10, 2019
Will Sustainability Take A Back Seat Or Steer a Green Recovery After COVID? by Joslyn Chittilapally, Lifegate, June 23, 2020
