Zen and the Art of Corporate
Productivity
More companies are battling employee stress with
meditation
Taken from: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_30/b3843076.htm
For Dave Jakubowski, vice-president of business
development for Internet service provider United Online (UNTD ) Inc., the job isn't
what it used to be. Instead of an unlimited expense
account and stays at the plush Chateau Marmont, the
31-year-old Manhattanite now brown-bags his lunch and
stays at a Hyatt when he's in Los Angeles on business. He
logs 18-hour days to help his Westlake Village (Calif.)-based company hit its
quarterly sales targets of around $8 million. How to
cope? Jakubowski is no
breathe-like-a-tree kind of guy. "I'm in
business," he says, "and I need results." So
he recently turned to a mat and 60 minutes of silence. "It's
amazing," he says of his new meditation practice. "I'm
able to sort through work challenges in this state of calm much faster than
trying to fight through it. And I make fewer
mistakes."
Increasingly, the overstretched and overburdened have a new answer to work
lives of gunning harder for what seems like less and less: Don't just do
something -- sit there. Companies increasingly are
falling for the allure of meditation, too, offering free, on-site classes. They're being won over, in part, by findings at the
National Institutes of Health, the University of Massachusetts, and the
Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard University that meditation enhances the
qualities companies need most from their knowledge workers: increased
brain-wave activity, enhanced intuition, better concentration, and the
alleviation of the kinds of aches and pains that plague employees most.
It doesn't hurt that meditation has some high-profile corporate disciples,
including bond-fund king William H. Gross, of Newport Beach (Calif.)'s Pacific
Investment Management Co., who often meditates with yoga before a day of
trading at his $349 billion money-management firm. Tech
outfits like Apple Computer (AAPL
), Yahoo!, and Google, which already offers an
organic chef and an on-site masseuse, are also signing up. So
are white-shoe, Old Economy outfits like consulting firm McKinsey, Deutsche
Bank, and Hughes Aircraft.
There are no hard numbers on how many companies have added meditation benefits,
but the anecdotal evidence is mounting. And it's no
surprise that more employers are seeking a new corporate balm.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health finds that
stress-related ailments cost companies about $200 billion a year in increased
absenteeism, tardiness, and the loss of talented workers. Between
70% to 90% of employee hospital visits are linked to stress. And
job tension is directly tied to a lack of productivity and loss of competitive
edge. "Stress is pretty much the No. 1 health
problem in the workplace," says Eric Biskamp,
co-founder of WorkLife Seminars in Dallas, who has
begun teaching one-on-one meditation skills to executives at Texas Instruments
(TXN ), Raytheon (RTN )
and Nortel Networks (NT ).
Meditation quiets mental chatter, explains coach Tevis
Trower of New York's Balance Integration Corp., which
develops meditation and yoga programs for large corporations.
"It lays the foundation for better decision-making and
communication," she says. Adds Viacom (VIA ) International Inc.'s
manager of work/life and training, Lisa Grossman: "These programs sound a
little out there. But they have a positive
impact."
Sometimes meditation classes are offered as a gesture of thanks for a job well
done. Consider AOL Time Warner Inc., where the sales
and marketing group was reduced from 850 to 500 people three years ago. Meditation classes were incorporated
to help employees deal with the new 12-hour days.
Other companies have added classes to help break up the drudgery of day-long
meetings. AstraZeneca (AZN ) Pharmaceuticals in
Wilmington, Del., now offers three meditation courses aimed at energizing its
5,000 employees during and after marathon powwows. "We
usually had a coffee and a Danish on our meeting
breaks and would go right into a sugar slump," says spokeswoman Lorraine
Ryan.
The icing for companies is that meditation programs come cheap. "Everybody is dealing with limited dollars,"
says Grossman. "It's important to keep things
going when times aren't so good." So employees
can breathe easy: This is one perk that isn't likely to get axed.
By Mara Der Hovanesian in
New York