Alleviate Work Related Stress with On-Line Mindfulness Training
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Managers who practice mindfulness have discovered that it improves their ability to encourage calm and stability in the workplace. They actually increase productivity when they model “mindful manager” qualities, such as listening before acting and leading people by focusing less on hierarchical relationships. “Do this because I told you to” becomes “Let’s talk about how and why we do things this way.” – Ruth W. Crocker
Stress is epidemic in the western workplace. A recent Harris poll found that 80 percent of workers feel stressed about one or more things in the workplace. This stress can lead to physical and psychological problems for managers and employees, including personal and professional burnout, absenteeism, lower productivity, and lower job satisfaction. Indeed, 46.4% of employees, report having psychological distress.
Call centers can be particularly stressful due to a heavy workload, sustained fast work pace, repetitive tasks, lack of control over the job, the blurred relation between feelings and actions, a competitive environment, and being faced with losing a client. These stresses can lead to problems, including visual, auditory, and speech fatigue. Indeed, each year, 60% of employees take sick leave and 39.4% of employees showed psychological distress symptoms and 8.3% found themselves in a severe situation of psychological distress, and 24% were taking psychoactive drugs. This also produces high turnover, with the average employee leaving the job after only a year.
Mindfulness training of employees is a potential help with work related stress. It has been shown to reduce the psychological and physical reactions to stress overall and particularly in the workplace and to reduce burnout. A problem in implementing mindfulness programs in the workplace is the time required for the training. This makes many managers reticent to try it. So, it is important to develop programs that do not seriously impact on work time. A potential solution is to train mindfulness on-line. Indeed, training over the internet has been found to be effective for anxiety depression.
In today’s Research News article “A Web-Based Mindfulness Stress Management Program in a Corporate Call Center: A Randomized Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Added Benefit of Onsite Group Support.” See:
or below, or view the full text of the study at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4768630/
Allexandre and colleagues implemented an 8-week on-line mindfulness stress management program for call center employees and compared its effectiveness to a wait-list control group. They implemented three different programs, a condition with on-line mindfulness training alone, a condition with mindfulness training combined with a support group, and a condition with mindfulness training and a support group led by a licensed clinical psychologist.
They found that all the on-line mindfulness training groups had greater reductions in perceived stress, and increases in emotional well-being, and emotional role functioning than the wait-list control group. These improvements were maintained at 8-weeks after the end of the training program. The addition of the support group produced greater satisfaction with the program and greater reductions in stress, and improvements in emotional well-being, and emotional role functioning than the mindfulness training alone group. Surprisingly, the addition of a clinical psychologist to the support group did not improve the support group’s effectiveness.
These results suggest that mindfulness training can be implemented over the internet and it can be effective in reducing stress and improving emotional well-being, and emotional role functioning for call center employees. It has been shown previously that mindfulness reduces the psychological and physiological responses to stress. These results demonstrate that this benefit can be produced with on-line training. They further demonstrate that adding a support group magnifies the effectiveness of the program. So, mindfulness can help, but mindfulness with support from other employees is substantially better. The sharing in support groups may well help the employee to see that their issues are shared by many, reducing their impact on the individuals work performance and well-being.
These findings suggest that a mindfulness training program that takes little time away from work can be successfully implemented and can have beneficial effects. This may be important for convincing managers and executives to implement such programs in their enterprises,
So, alleviate work related stress with on-line mindfulness training.
“Teaching mindfulness to employees can help them take a step back, think through a problem and consider all options. And that can improve decision making and positively affect the bottom line. One recent study, for example, showed that when call center employees took part in a mindfulness program, client satisfaction increased. Employees were also less stressed, anxious and fatigued on the job, thereby increasing productivity.” – Lisa Wirthman
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
Study Summary
Allexandre, D., Bernstein, A. M., Walker, E., Hunter, J., Roizen, M. F., & Morledge, T. J. (2016). A Web-Based Mindfulness Stress Management Program in a Corporate Call Center: A Randomized Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Added Benefit of Onsite Group Support. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 58(3), 254–264. http://doi.org/10.1097/JOM.0000000000000680
Abstract
Objective: The objective of this study is to determine the effectiveness of an 8-week web-based, mindfulness stress management program (WSM) in a corporate call center and added benefit of group support.
Methods: One hundred sixty-one participants were randomized to WSM, WSM with group support, WSM with group and expert clinical support, or wait-list control. Perceived stress, burnout, emotional and psychological well-being, mindfulness, and productivity were measured at baseline, weeks 8 and 16, and 1 year.
Results: Online usage was low with participants favoring CD use and group practice. All active groups demonstrated significant reductions in perceived stress and increases in emotional and psychological well-being compared with control. Group support improved participation, engagement, and outcomes.
Conclusion: A self-directed mindfulness program with group practice and support can provide an affordable, effective, and scalable workplace stress management solution. Engagement may also benefit from combining web-based and traditional CD delivery.