To teach or not to teach workers to meditate, that is the question

There are hundreds of videos on YouTube with guided meditations to improve concentration or simply relax.

This is how one of them begins: “You are at this moment in a comfortable, quiet place, you close your eyes gently.”

The video barely lasts 15 minutes and has 200,000 views.

Others reach two million.

But the success of relaxation does not stop there.

Gurus and companies offer this type of guided meditations – of longer duration, about 40 minutes per session – to other companies and their workers.

A particular business is worth around 60 billion dollars (about 55 billion euros) worldwide.

However, more and more studies that analyze these practices cast doubt on them: a two-week meditation course does not have long-term effects on the worker, especially when the causes of stress are in the work itself.

There are always exceptions to the rule, but an analysis carried out by expert William J. Fleming for the University of Oxford this January is categorical: “The participants do not seem to be in a better situation” after attending the meditation program, says the expert in your report.

Applications for meditation or receiving an express course on techniques to deal with stress that are not applied later do not work either.

Fleming analyzed dozens of tests carried out with different workers in different companies (just over 46,000 workers spread across 233 companies) and concluded that the vast majority of them “did not provide additional resources” to the employee to deal with work stress.

The researcher gives a reason: it makes no sense to try to change the individual without changing the work environment in which his activity takes place.

“Despite evidence supporting the effectiveness of organizational change and task redesign to improve worker well-being, interventions directed at the individual are the most common,” says Fleming.

Another study, this time by two authors who research at universities in the United States, concluded the same thing in 2019 after analyzing 32,974 employees of a large company.

One group participated in wellness programs and another did not.

At first, the result seemed positive: those who had received the course reported a greater sense of well-being than those who had stayed at home.

However, that difference disappeared after a year without taking the course again.

Business on the rise

Even so, these types of programs have been on an upward spiral for years.

An analysis by Exactitude Consultancy estimates the market for wellness solutions for companies at $57 billion (€52.9 billion) in 2020 and predicts annual growth of 9% between now and 2029. These figures coincide with those obtained by the center data analysis company Mordor Intelligence, which valued this market at 60.4 billion dollars (about 56 billion euros) in 2021 and forecasts annual growth of 7%.

State worker protection laws and statistics negatively linking mental health and productivity have helped popularize these types of practices.

The largest market is the United States, but Europe is slowly catching up on the wave.

In Spain, only 23% of companies offer emotional well-being programs to their employees, and the courses are still a strange fad, according to the Human Resources Trends 2023 study, prepared by the company Pluxee, specialized in employee benefits services. .

The professionals who give this type of programs assure that consistency is key for learning to have a real effect.

Thais Alonso has been dedicated to this for more than 20 years, she has a CFO (Chief Happiness Officer) certificate from La Salle University and was a pioneer in the development of mindfulness training programs

for

organizations in Spain.

The minimum training she offers is two weeks, although she prefers it to last a month.

“I also give them homework, meditation exercises to do at home.

From my courses you can take some tools for moments of greatest stress, but what is important is that if you want to see long-term results, train your mind constantly and regularly,” explains the professional.

Alonso has worked for companies such as Toyota or Siemens.

Alonso defends that what is important “is how each person manages stressful situations, whether at work or in life.”

These techniques can also help develop other skills, especially when the stress is generated by the company that is paying for the course to reduce it.

“Another thing is that stress is generated by an injustice such as the company's schedule or productivity goals.

What

mindfulness

helps us there is to work on communication and assertiveness, being able to say without fear things that you think need to be adjusted.”

“This practice does not serve to exploit workers so that they do not have stress.

"If they ask me that, I won't do it," the expert states bluntly.

Since she started, Alonso has been able to verify that, although most of the workers do not continue with the practice, others never stopped and call her from time to time to thank her.

Make it a habit

Elisa Sánchez, psychologist and human resources expert, believes that creating the habit is essential for this to work.

“For it to have that permanent positive effect on your health, it has to be something that is internalized and that you incorporate as a habit into your life,” she says.

Sánchez, who has also specialized in techniques to help workers with stress, explains that these are different from meditation.

There are many types: relaxation techniques (which include muscle and mental relaxation), or

mindfulness

, which differs from meditation in that it does not have the objective of relaxing.

The most common criticism that these programs face has to do with the intention of the company that pays for them.

André Spicer, professor of organizational behavior at the University of London and writer of the book

Business Bullshit

, stated in an article in

The Guardian

that the factors that generate the greatest stress in workers are in the work itself.

Insecurity about the future of work, very long working hours and lack of support from the company have a great impact on employee stress.

Spicer points to a study that discovered the most effective ways to improve worker well-being: reducing wasteful bureaucratic procedures, reducing meeting lengths, improving shifts, and giving employees a sense of psychological security in their team.

Sánchez defends that these types of measures come first, and then meditation and relaxation techniques.

“The Occupational Risk Prevention Law says that the company is responsible for caring for the health of the workforce; risks that cannot be avoided must be measured and everything possible must be done to minimize them.”

That is why the psychosocial problems faced by employees are becoming more and more important.

“The company has the obligation to improve working conditions to prevent them from being stressful, and that is a priority, companies have to minimize the workload, the pace, the difficulty, the space is ergonomic, all of that,” Add.

Then there is the second level: “Provide people with tools to minimize those risks that cannot be avoided, such as the stress that is inevitable in some jobs, and this type of relaxation and meditation techniques would come in,” Sánchez admits.

“Enjoy this moment, your moment,” ends the 15-minute guided meditation that began at the beginning of this article.

“Smile and be deeply grateful with all your being.

Thank you,” he says before the screen goes black.