A common question I hear as a researcher, and one we get asked at eMindful as a provider of mindfulness programs, is, “How does mindfulness affect workplace performance?” That is, does it affect whether employees deliver quality results, consistently meet deadlines, keep customers happy and avoid costly mistakes?
The benefits of mindfulness
“The benefits of mindfulness have clear implications for productivity and workplace performance.”
Although this is a new area of investigation, research has shown:
· Compared to their counterparts in a control group, managers who received mindfulness training showed
· Restaurant servers who were more mindful
· Physicians who were more mindful received
· Hospital admissions teams who participated in a mindfulness intervention
· Compared to clients of psychotherapists in a control group, the clients of mindfulness-trained psychotherapists
There also appears to be a link between mindfulness and safety performance. In a study of control room operators at a nuclear power plant, mindfulness was
So now that evidence is starting to accumulate, how might mindfulness enhance the way employees work? Researchers see several possibilities, each discussed briefly below.
Performance levels
Recall from our previous article that mindfulness exerts its benefits primarily through improved attention, including being less distractible, better able to concentrate, and less susceptible to mind wandering. It may come as no surprise, then, that mindfulness yields overall performance improvements. A study of MBA students showed that more mindful individuals
These benefits have clear implications for employers, where fluid intelligence (the capacity to solve novel problems and think “outside the box”), overall positivity, and diminished stress responses have been shown to enhance performance. Each of these has been linked to mindfulness in experimental settings. And the mechanisms by which these effects work can be traced back to actual changes in the brain.
Performance variability
Separate from employees’ performance relative to peers is their own performance variability. Even great performers aren’t 100% consistent. We all have times when we’re “off.” Mindfulness training can help.
Mindfulness appears to help stabilize attention and regulate emotion and behavior. These may be important in reducing performance troughs and increasing consistency.
Performance buffering
Modern workplaces are full of interruptions that hijack our attention and threaten productivity. Studies estimate that even miniscule disruptions — such as an instant message —
Nurses in one study
Interruptions require time to re-orient to the task at hand. And interruptions tend to leave a “residue” of attention still thinking about the disruption instead of the present task. Interestingly, one experiment showed that five minutes of mindfulness practice can
Performance motivation and goals
Mindfulness research has shed light into motivation — for example, whether an extrinsic reward such as money actually motivates employees. Brain imaging research shows that mindfulness trainees are
By improving attention and awareness of one’s own internal cues (particularly body sensations, emotions and thoughts), mindfulness training alters the perception of moment-to-moment experience, making everyday activities feel important, valued and enjoyable. In the workplace, this may help employees engage in activities with a sense of eagerness, choice and willingness, otherwise known as autonomous motivation.
Compared to action that is extrinsically motivated, autonomously motivated action tends to be more satisfying, persists longer, and leads to greater success.
So to summarize, mindfulness may enhance workplace performance by:
1) boosting performance levels through improved attention and cognition,
2) reducing personal variation or performance “troughs,”
3) making employees less susceptible to the impact of distractions and interruptions,
4) shifting motivation from extrinsic to autonomous sources, which has greater likelihood of success.