As a half-dozen women filter into a yoga studio on a recent afternoon, passing glowing candles and Buddhist statuary, they absorb the ethereal voice of a woman crooning praises to the earth via a boombox set on a bare wooden floor. They sit on yoga mats, gaze toward foliage outside and draw in a collective breath, echoing the instructor leading this midday meditation class.
They are not here on vacation. Nor are they at a spa or a gym. For the women gathered here, this is part of the workday at Promega Corp., a biotech company on the outskirts of this university town. They are here on company time, paying rates heavily subsidized by their employer, because the people running Promega have concluded that meditation classes -- along with yoga, ubiquitous fitness centers, workspaces infused with natural light, and healthy meals -- contribute to a happier, healthier working experience. And happier, healthier workers make for a stronger business.
In other parts of Promegas expansive campus, scientists are scribbling on whiteboards in pursuit of fresh applications derived from the genome. Line workers are inspecting DNA analysis kits used by crime scene investigators, then depositing them into orange boxes bearing the company logo. Executives occupying conference rooms plot the conquest of new markets in the Middle East and Asia.
All of these pursuits are central components of a private business that employs 1,200 people worldwide and claims $300 million in annual revenues. So, too, is the scene in the meditation class, Promega executives assert."You create a culture of wellness," says Promega's chief medical officer, Ashley G. Anderson Jr. "If you create a culture in which vibrant physicality is an admired thing, you've achieved a lot. A healthy workforce is a productive workforce."
Across a widening swath of the American corporate landscape, meditation, yoga and other practices once confined to the bohemian fringes are emerging as new techniques toward the harvesting of profit. Promega is among the increasing ranks of companies that have come to embrace so-called mindfulness activities -- concentrated meditation aimed at sharpening focus and reducing stress -- in a bid to improve the well-being of their workforces and, by extension, the bottom line.
This is no gut-level gamble. A growing body of research suggests that yoga and meditation may reduce the stress that tends to assail bodies confined to desks for hours at a time. Companies are investing in the notion that limiting stress will translate into fewer employee absences, lower health care costs and higher morale, encouraging workers to stick around.
Many of the companies that have launched such programs have stripped meditation of any hint of Eastern spiritual provenance, reducing it to a management elixir aimed at capturing the full potential of the people cashing the paychecks. Chade-Meng Tan, a widely celebrated Silicon Valley meditation teacher whose specially designed unit, Search Inside Yourself, has been taught to more than 1,000 Google employees, describes the objective as cultivating "emotional intelligence," or EI.
"Everybody knows this EI thing is good for their career," Meng recently told Wired magazine. "And every company knows that if their people have EI, they're gonna make a shitload of money."No one really knows how many companies have adopted meditation and yoga practices, but the number is clearly on the rise. Approximately one-fourth of all major American employers now deliver some version of stress reduction, according to journalist David Gelles, whose forthcoming book, Mindful Work, explores the spread of meditation and yoga inside the business world -- a trend now reaching beyond Silicon Valley.
"It's about training our minds to be more focused, to see with clarity, to have spaciousness for creativity and to feel connected," the company's deputy general counsel Janice Marturano tells Gelles. "That compassion to ourselves, to everyone around us -- our colleagues, customers -- that's what the training of mindfulness is really about."The programs available to employees are as varied as the individual philosophies of their employers, but they share one basic understanding: Stress is an expensive threat to the balance sheet. Mindfulness is an antidote to stress.
Stress harms human health, resulting in higher medical bills borne by employers. Stress interferes with sleep, yielding employees whose judgment may be impaired, making them prone to costly mistakes. Stress shuts down the sort of creative thinking that can generate profitable ideas.Workplace stress respects no boundaries, following workers home and reconstituting itself as family stress that then finds its way back to the cubicle in a feedback loop of tension. Unchecked, this sort of stress can fill an office with burnt-out people consumed with managing dread, anger and anxiety instead of the company's business.
"When people go home and they have had a stressful day, that influences the family," says Bill Linton, Promega's founder and chief executive officer. "The dog gets kicked. It has an effect in the community. That's not a good outcome.I'm looking at getting the light bar from ford racing and was wondering who sells the Shun Stone Marble Tiles."
Mark Bertolini, chief executive officer of Aetna, the medical insurance giant, frequently tells the story of the broken neck he suffered in a skiing accident nearly a decade ago. The resulting pain was excruciating. So excruciating that it set him on a desperate search for any therapy that might provide relief. This is how he stumbled into yoga and meditation. This is how he eventually came to have his company make meditation and yoga classes available to employees.
Some people think Im weird, Bertolini says. They say Im only doing it because of my own experiences. And I say, I may be weird, but Im also in charge of the company.But to those who may claim the boss is being frivolous, Bertolini emphasizes that the program was provoked by concern for the sorts of corporate interest that get captured in a spreadsheet: Aetna determined that workers in its most stress-prone positions were racking up medical bills that exceeded those of other employees by an average of $2,000 a year. Last year, Aetna reduced its health care costs by 7 percent -- a savings the CEO pegs in part to limiting stress through meditation and yoga.
Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, has emerged as an authority in the nascent field of studying the effects of Asian-inspired meditation practices on the traditionally un-Zen-like domain of the business world. In the summer of 1997, he led a research project that studied the impacts of a limited meditation program on the brain and immune system functions of workers at Promega.
One team of workers engaged in a weekly meditation class led by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the medical professor celebrated as a pioneer of mindfulness training. A control group went about their lives as usual, without meditation. Following the eight-week class, Davidson's researchers hooked up the participants' to an EEG machine to record their brain activity. The team gave participants flu shots and then took blood samples. The people who got the meditation showed "changes in their brain function toward ways associated with well-being and resilience," Davidson says. They also showed "improved response to vaccine."
For Linton, Promega's CEO, those findings merely reinforced what he accepted as truth. "It affirmed for me the value of mindfulness and meditation," he says.Davidson is the founder of The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, a Madison research entity that has become the center of efforts to study the impacts of meditation and yoga in schools and in the business world. Many of the corporate programs the center is pursuing involve quick sessions of meditation incorporated in the workday at regular intervals -- perhaps three minutes of every hour.
"People don't want to live in something that's not up to their standards. They're willing to make big changes even if they'll only be there a couple of years," says Noble Black, a broker with Corcoran in New York, where the vacancy rate was just 1.9% in the first quarter of 2013, down from 2.1% a year earlier.
"My friends think I'm crazy. But if it's something you're going to live in for the next three years, you don't mind spending the money. It's worth it. It's about lifestyle," says Daniel de la Vega, who looked for a rental for eight months in Miami and couldn't find exactly what he wanted. He eventually settled on an apartment that had the finishes he liked, but a floor plan that seemed too constricting. He tore down a wall to eliminate one of the bedrooms and make the living room larger.Most modern headlight designs include Shun Stone Packing & Loading Products.
Mr. de la Vega, a managing partner of One Sotheby's Realty in Miami, received permission from his landlord to make the changes.After searching around the Lights section of this forum, I've come across two main suppliers for Shun Stone Tombstone & Monuments. What he didn't get was any reduction in the rent in exchange for his investment. His lease, which is two years with a one-year renewal option, specifies he must return the apartment to the way it was before he made the changes. But he isn't worried he will have to put back the wall. "I know when I'm done he will love it so much he won't make me," he says of the landlord.
While the vast majority of redos by renters tend to be superficial—such as a new paint job or carpeting—landlords and building managers across the country report they are also seeing far more expensive and elaborate renovations. They are also getting more requests for structural changes such as knocking down walls, adding new bathrooms and custom built-in closets.
"The evidence at this point is modest," Davidson says. "This kind of an approach is more of a promissory note than one based on hard scientific evidence, but we're interested in gathering evidence. But there's good reason to believe that this might be true."As Lucy Kubly arrives for the noon meditation class at Promega on this recent afternoon, she requires no proof.An administrative manager, she spends her workday overseeing the schedules and inboxes of two busy Promega executives. Her brain struggles to keep pace with an unrelenting gusher of correspondence, meetings needing to be arranged, travel emergencies to fix. Her 45 minutes spent breathing and making her mind go blank is her means of getting the static out of her thinking, freeing her to excel at her job.
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