Why IOSM?
Better You. Better Team. Better Enterprise.
Three Baseline Capabilities
Organizational excellence flows from the health and wellbeing, intellectual performance and emotional intelligence of our leaders and workforce. All-science mindfulness is a proven neural process that strengthens these three baseline capabilities, and so produces a strong and positive culture, creates greater engagement, unlocks creativity and innovation, and delights customers.
More Effective Leaders
For leaders, mindfulness is a positive force-multiplier for important inter-personal competencies, including self awareness, authenticity, presence, trustworthiness, social awareness, empathy, intuition and influence. At the same time, it’s proven to increase mental clarity, focus and concentration, strategy and planning, critical thinking and decision-making.
A Higher
Performing Workforce
Mindfulness is an important new set of mental and emotional skills that enable a positive and growth mindset, stronger engagement, sharper focus, deeper concentration, better communication and collaboration, and greater individual and team performance.
A More Productive Workplace
In the workplace, mindfulness reduces chronic stress, anxiety, distraction, unconscious bias, conflict, toxicity and burnout. This drives down healthcare costs, absenteeism, workplace accidents and turnover costs, while increasing innovation, quality, safety, inclusion and top line productivity.
How IOSM Helps
We're building communities, doing research, creating curriculum, and defining practices that drive leadership effectiveness, individual excellence, and business performance
Membership and Community
IOM is a big tent for leaders in business, science, healthcare, education, non-profit, and government organizations. Together, we’re building a global learning community, to advance the practice of science-based mindfulness for personal and organizational performance — and a platform for shared experiences, best practices, and lesson-learned at the front lines of today’s workplace.
Organizational Research
Over the past three decades, thousands of studies have confirmed the neural, biological, and psychological outcomes of mindfulness — but only a handful have focused on the adoption, efficacy, or impact of mindfulness in organizational or management sciences. Our mission includes sponsoring studies, conducting original research, and providing greater access to reporting from around the world.
Education and Certification
A widespread adoption of mindfulness in the modern organization requires consistent teaching and coaching standards, a rigorously secular and science-based curriculum, effective certification, and a system of measures, metrics and analytics to track and document business results. With the help of our members, we’re designing the blueprint and tools for this “enterprise-ready” mindfulness.
“At the heart of our most intractable business problems, we find people problems: chronic stress and burnout, interpersonal conflict, miscommunication, poor decision-making, and more. We waste massive amounts of money, time, energy, and resources trying to fix these issues, yet the true costs are much larger than we know.”
Thompson et al, Harvard Business Review, 2016
Sleepwalking into a Mental Health Crisis
A perfect storm of global pandemic, economic crisis, political upheaval, and a massive disruption of norms has taken us to a tipping point for the decades of escalating mental and emotional challenges in the workplace.
It’s shined a sudden spotlight on our chronic stress and illness, anxiety, bias, conflict, exhaustion, and burnout. Mental and emotional distress are serious threats to effective leadership, teamwork, innovation, quality, service, and productivity - leading ultimately to a disastrous turnover of top talent, and erosion of client trust.
What Destroys Human Productivity?
Chronic Stress
Chronic Illness
Anxiety Disorder
Workplace stress has become the most pervasive health threat of the new century and is a major contributor to the 9 leading causes of premature death (NIH, WHO)
45% of Americans suffer from a chronic disease, with 25% impacted by multiple chronic conditions (NIH)
22% of Americans are taking medication for anxiety disorder today, and researchers project that another 30% are eligible but undiagnosed. (CDC)
The world’s knowledge is doubling every 11 months, and the average human attention span has dropped below 8 seconds (Schilling, Microsoft)
The average worker manages 120 messages a day, switches screen channels 37 times an hour, and is interrupted every 3 minutes (DMR, UC Irvine)
ADT is now an epidemic in the workplace, with core symptoms of distractibility, inner frenzy, disorganization and impatience (Halliwell, HBR)
76% of employees report being disengaged or actively disengaged at work, resulting in lost productivity estimated to average18% of annual salary. (Gallup)
48% of African American women and 47% Latina women report being mistaken for administrative or custodial staff. (HBR.org)
56% of workers report current exposure to a toxic manager, 35% have experienced verbal abuse, intimidation or humiliation by a supervisor (Gallup)
37% of managerial time is now spent mediating conflict, 98% of workers have recently experienced it and 23% are continually exposed to it (CCP, Mediate)
65% of workers have experienced “office rage”, 22% report they “feel anger a lot” at work, and 21% have reported lashing out at a customer (Accountemps, Gallup)
89% of workers feel continually behind schedule, and over 50% feel both overworked and overwhelmed (Family Work Institute)
35% of Americans are sleep disordered, or otherwise frequently impacted by not getting enough sleep (CDC)
69% of workers experience daily fatigue at work. 97% of those workers experience a decline in cognitive performance, resulting in lack of attention, increased errors, and lower productivity (WHO)
The average American adult makes 35,000 decisions a day, with a 65% degradation in the quality of judgment through the day (Columbia University)
From an 8.5% pre-pandemic base, trauma-related depression has risen to a reported 32.8% of American adults (NHANES)
76% of workers report experiencing work-related burnout, with symptoms of exhaustion, negativity and reduced performance. (Harris)
Info Overload
Digital Distraction
Attention Deficit
Disengagement
Unconscious Bias
Toxic Management
Workplace Conflict
Dysregulation
Overwork
Sleep Disorder
Exhaustion
Decision Fatigue
Depression
Burnout
What's the Organizational Impact?
Healthcare Costs
Absenteeism
Absence
Employer-paid premiums in the U.S. have increased 22% over the past 5 years, and annual costs are now over $900 billion. (Integrated Benefits Institute)
Loss in productivity due to illness (absenteeism) and impaired performance (presenteeism) result in over 500 million lost work days, and costs of over $575 billion a year. (Integrated Benefits Institute)
Non-illness-related absence averages $2,600 to $3,600 a year per employee, totaling another $43 billion a year in direct costs for U.S. employers. (Circadian)
Being paid for time not applied to work consists of seemingly harmless habits like texting a friend, or checking social media. But “time theft” costs American companies over $400 billion a year. (ASE)
A disengaged employee is estimated to cost $3,500 for every $10,000 in salary. With self-reported disengagement of 70% and more, this loss in productivity exceeds $500 billion a year (Gallup)
Companies in the U.S. lose $359 billion a year due to diminished work performance, waste of management time, low employee morale, and loss of revenue due to personal conflicts (CCL)
SHRM estimates that toxic workplace leaders and cultures have driven 20% of U.S. employees out of their jobs in the past 5 years, at a turnover cost of $223 billion (SHRM)
On average, employers spend $120,000 on every workplace injury, many due to preventable accidents that cost them over $171 billion a year. (National Safety Council)
Replacement cost for an employee is a minimum of 1.5 to 2 times salary, plus lost knowledge, specialized skills, domain experience and relationships. Employee turnover results in losses of $1.8 trillion a year. (Hubspot)
Distraction
Disengagement
Conflict
Toxicity
Accidents
Turnover
"In a fast-paced world, increasing numbers of people are exhausted, overwhelmed, and disengaged. Our workplaces are full of burned-out leaders, who report little bandwidth for big-picture thinking, for innovation, for truly understanding others, or building strong cultures. The skills to work with our minds, our emotions, and other people are essential – but rarely developed.”
Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI)