Mindfulness in the Workplace | Lindsey Cameron

What Is Mindfulness at Work?

Dan Loney: When you talk about wellness in the workplace, there are traditional elements like employee health. But added into the mix in recent years is the concept of mindfulness. Lindsey Cameron is an assistant professor of management here at the Wharton School and has done research on this area. She joins me here in studio. Lindsey, when you think about the concept of mindfulness, how do you best describe it?

Lindsey Cameron: What’s happening right now in the present moment. So, where are your feet? Where’s your back? How’s the quality of your breath? Present moment awareness.

Loney: Thinking about it in the scope of the workplace, how does that connection come together?

Cameron: It depends a bit about what your job is. What does it mean to be fully in the present moment? If you’re a call center rep, it’s that right before you pick up the call, taking that breath. How are you going to interact with that client? Kobe Bryant was a great meditator, really well known for what he did. And for him, that moment of presence when he’s at the free throw line, taking that shot. It’s just about being present in whatever your core task is at work.

Loney: Part of wellness ties into the pandemic and thinking about employee health in general. How much have they thought about the concept of mindfulness as a component of the health of their employees?

Cameron: I would say it probably started in the late 2000s, early 2010s. That is when I really saw a big uptick about mindfulness in the workplace. Many of the CEOs of the big health insurance companies, like Aetna, started doing big rollouts of their mindfulness programs. But Jon Kabat-Zinn started in the ‘70s and ‘80s, teaching mindfulness-based stress reduction. It has a lot of research behind it. It’s been well used across many different industries. When I served in Iraq, I meditated there, too. And that was early 2000s.

Loney: In the scope of working every day in the office, mindfulness could be probably a few different things, depending on the individual, correct?

Cameron: Exactly. There’s this misconception that mindfulness is, you’ve got to be on that meditation cushion, near a lake, going “ohm” every day. And that is the more traditional Eastern, contemplative version of mindfulness. But many of the ways it’s been secularized and brought it into the West, there are ways where you can incorporate it much more easily into your everyday life.

Loney: What was it that first had you interested in looking at mindfulness in connection with the workplace?

Cameron: I served in our war in Iraq in 2007-2008. That was sort of common practice, of things that were offered to people deployed, was these mindfulness techniques. There’s actually a fair amount of research that shows that Special Forces, before they go out, if they meditate, there’s a jump in their executive functioning. Even for people who are about to do the GRE, we’re seeing increases in their scores if they meditate. There are these programs that were offered about mindfulness when I was deployed, which started my personal interest. Then the academic interest came much later.

Loney: When you’re talking about mindfulness in the workplace, the benefits for the individual can be very, very strong. But companies think about bottom line benefits. So, there’s probably a health care benefit that aids them in terms of what they’re providing for their employees.

Cameron: I think at the baseline, you would say something like people would have lower neuroticism, more emotional stability if they’re doing mindfulness. But what my research was also showing, what are the intrapersonal benefits? How does it benefit other people? I looked at call center reps to see, if they meditated, does that improve customer satisfaction scores of people on the other line? Does that improve morale among people and their teammates?

Yes, there are individual bottom-line benefits. But there’s a way in which there are also group and team benefits. There’s another line of research that looks at how medical teams are less likely to make errors if there are these collective mindfulness practices. There are multiple benefits of being able to be focused at the personal level, so that the organization can receive some sort of a benefit, too.

How Can Companies Support Employee Mindfulness?

Loney: Companies are understanding more and more that it could be just a couple of minutes at a time. But giving that employee that opportunity to go down that path, just to have maybe that that small break. And the benefits can be substantial.

Cameron: Companies do all different types of interventions. There’s no one size approach fits all. I’ve seen some where they’ve been the traditional six-to-eight week Jon Kabat-Zinn MBSR programs. But what I worked on in my experiments, in my research, are these more on-the-spot interventions. What can you do for two to three minutes, over two to three weeks, to sort of build up that muscle and put in those reps?

Loney: You originally did this research back in 2019. Since then, the pandemic changed a lot of people’s thought process about a lot within the office. How do you think the pandemic impacted the need for mindfulness?

Cameron: I can’t say anything has changed. You know, mindfulness is five, six, seven, 8,000 years old. This is a contemplative practice. It might seem like it’s new to the West, but it’s helped people throughout millennia. So when you look at the pandemic — yes, that was a shock that happened. But these are core tools that the research says have lots of benefits for both individuals, groups, and organizations.

Loney: My kids, when they were little, their school had a mindfulness class that they went to once a week. It’s not just businesses that are starting to understand this. There are so many other segments of our life that are maybe incorporating this.

Cameron: Right. My little nephew loves this movie called The Red Panda. It has this girl who basically meditates to calm herself down, because if she doesn’t, she’ll get very angry and explode into a red panda. So, these techniques of basic emotional regulation can be taught from a really young age. You’ve probably heard of that study about, don’t eat the marshmallow. When people are able to have that sort of self-control, there are all these benefits in life. But mindfulness is just another way to have emotional regulation. To allow you to separate and have a gap between a stimulus and a response. And that’s something we need at any age of our life. The pandemic was just one recent crisis. But life is all about weathering one crisis after another.

Loney: How important does this become for companies in the landscape of health care programs they’re bringing forward for their employees?

Cameron: It should be a core benefit that the company should offer. The question is, in what form really makes sense? Are you doing the type of work where you want to pay for people to take a six-to-eight-week training class? That might really work in a medical environment. We see lots of results that show if you can have these sort of interventions happen, people are more likely to do heedful interrelating and look at SOPs and checklists very carefully to make sure there are not medical errors.

That’s one bigger type of investment versus do you just give people a subscription to something like Headspace or Muse or any of these apps? There’s a lot of different variations about how you implement a mindfulness program. And there’s also different types of mindfulness. Another thing that my research has shown is that loving kindness meditation, which is where you sort of beam loving kindness and goodwill to people, can have a different set of outcomes versus if you’re doing just focused breath. So, it can really be organization-specific, what they’re going to choose to implement.

Loney: Does the concept of mindfulness gain any benefit by the community that you have within your office and being there? Because there’s obviously a larger conversation around remote work and being in the office right now.

Cameron: That’s a really good question. There’s a critique that a lot of these mindfulness practices have been McDonald-ized. There’s a way they’ve been stripped down from their traditional context. I’m actually very active in an ashram and a sangha, and I’m ordained. There’s a way in which I really practice in community that isn’t translated a lot into the organizational setting.

My research, and other’s as well, shows it can be effective when it’s practiced individually. So, in this remote environment. But someone who’s traditional in these practices would say that’s not the real benefit, because the goal for mindfulness is not to be better at your work or to get higher performance scores. It’s to reach enlightenment and to end suffering.

Future Research on Mindfulness and Psychedelics

Loney: Off of the research you did in 2019, what other areas are you looking to try and follow up?

Cameron: Oh, that’s really exciting. I’m glad you brought that up. Because I’m just starting this project, so I’d be interested in talking to people who are interested. This is in coordination with the Mack Center, our center here for innovation. And you’ve probably seen a lot about psychedelics in the news. Traditionally, it’s been used as a medicine in a lot of Indigenous spiritual communities. It’s being used more in the West. Sometimes spiritually, sometimes recreationally, sometimes therapeutically. But what psychedelics do is create a sense of deep mindfulness in the person, and also a sense of ego dissolution, so that people become less me-centered and can be more other-centered.

This research, which I’m doing with a postdoc, Elena Wong, here at Wharton, is about how you can induce mindfulness through people who are doing these psilocybin retreats. And then what are the impacts for tech workers? What is the impact for innovation and leadership? There have been quite a few recent articles in Wired and The New York Times that have been talking about tech CEOs going these retreats, taking psilocybin, and then having insights to move their company forward. So that’s the research I’m looking into, the new space.

Loney: It’s interesting you bring that up, because I think we’ve talked about this in the scope of the employee. But there’s an element of what mindfulness can bring to the executive, to the leader of companies as well.

Cameron: There is. This is all anecdotal, if you read the recent articles in The Times and Wired. But they talk about a great more sense of openness, risk taking, higher amounts of creativity, anything that you want a senior leadership to have, to be openhearted and openminded. These would have in-depth meditation immersion experiences, which often happen in a group as well, seem to be a catalyst for that.