Organizational mindfulness is founded on the (fairly recent) scientific understanding that the outcomes of mindfulness are not a metaphysical construct, but a physical reality. The fact that an employee can be taught to train the brain for cognitive and emotional strength, fundamentally changes the game for the organization.
But we're all trustees of our own store of human capital, and we alone decide whether, or how much of that improved neural asset we'll contribute to our employer. It’s up to the organization to prove worthy, either through its purpose, or its commitment to its stakeholders, or by otherwise earning our emotional investment.
That contribution represents a measure of engagement, which is dangerously low across virtually every major Western corporation. Over the past generation, workers have seen lower wages, longer hours, higher stress and an increasingly toxic workplace. Engagement, which represents the emotional bond between company and worker, has frayed, mostly because employees have lost trust that the company has their interests at heart This tension isn’t new, but it’s become acute in the past several decades. It’s not something that can be healed with free snacks and an annual company picnic. But it can be healed through mindfulness.
A Turnaround in Mental State
But for the first time ever, companies can make an investment, not in an employee’s skills, but in their mental state. Mindfulness doesn’t just improve a competency, it changes how an individual experiences the world – which in turn is a force multiplier for any number of competencies at once.
Mindfulness is transformational, not only for the individual, but for the organization that is the ultimate beneficiary of their commitment and hard work. It re-engages the individual by focusing attention on the present, and strengthening regions of the brain associated with task-positive motivation.
This is near the top of a long list of the business benefits of mindfulness, as it represents a powerful, straightforward opportunity for companies to reclaim the passion and engagement of their workforce.
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