Improve Executives’ Attitudes Toward Work with a Mindfulness App
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Mindful working means applying focus and awareness to everything you do from the moment you enter the office. Focus on the task at hand and recognize and release internal and external distractions as they arise. In this way, mindfulness helps increase effectiveness, decrease mistakes, and even enhance creativity.” – Rasmus Hougaard
Work is very important for our health and well-being. We spend approximately 25% of our adult lives at work. Indeed, the work environment has even become an important part of our social lives, with friendships and leisure time activities often attached to the people we work with. But work-related stress is epidemic in the western workplace. Almost two thirds of workers reporting high levels of stress at work. This stress can result in impaired health and can result in burnout; producing fatigue, cynicism, and professional inefficacy. To help overcome unhappiness, stress, and burnout, mindfulness practices have been implemented in the workplace. These mindfulness practices have been shown to markedly reduce the physiological and psychological responses to stress.
The vast majority of the mindfulness training techniques, however, require a trained teacher. The participants must be available to attend multiple sessions at particular scheduled times that may or may not be compatible with busy employee schedules and at locations that may not be convenient. As an alternative, apps for smartphones have been developed. These have tremendous advantages in decreasing costs, making training schedules much more flexible, and eliminating the need to go repeatedly to specific locations. But the question arises as to the effectiveness of these apps in inducing mindfulness and reducing stress and improving psychological well-being in executives in real-world work settings.
In today’s Research News article “An App-Based Workplace Mindfulness Intervention, and Its Effects Over Time.” (See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8101632/ ) Lu and colleagues recruited working executives who had signed up for an 8-week mindfulness program on the Awakened Mind® platform. The App contained 8 weekly mindfulness meditation sessions. They were measured before, weekly during, and after training for mindfulness, emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and job satisfaction.
They found that the higher the levels of mindfulness, the higher the levels of work engagement, and job satisfaction and the lower the levels of emotional exhaustion. They also found that over time mindfulness grew stronger which in turn produced greater levels of work engagement, and job satisfaction and lower levels of emotional exhaustion. These effects grew throughout the 8 weeks of training but the rate of change was greatest early in training slowing later in training. Hence, the app increases mindfulness over time and this in turn improves workplace attitudes.
One problem encountered was that participation rates decreased over the 8 weeks of training such that by the end of training only 54% of the original participants were still using the app. This might suggest that experimental mortality could account for the results. But the fact that the effects were present early in the program when participation rates were high suggests that use of the app and not a confounding variable was responsible for the effects.
The results suggest that business executives benefit from using a mindfulness meditation app and further suggest that the app increases mindfulness which is responsible for the improved attitudes toward work. Mindfulness has been previously shown to reduce burnout at work. This suggests that this simple, convenient, and inexpensive mindfulness training should be recommended for business executives.
So, improve executives’ attitudes toward work with a mindfulness App.
“a brief two-week mindfulness training app can change a person’s biological response to stress.” – Emily K. Lindsay
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Lu, Y., Remond, J., Bunting, M., Ilies, R., Tripathi, N., & Narayanan, J. (2021). An App-Based Workplace Mindfulness Intervention, and Its Effects Over Time. Frontiers in psychology, 12, 615137. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.615137
Abstract
We investigated the week-to-week effects of a mindfulness intervention on emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and job satisfaction in a field study involving 218 participants who participated and reported their weekly outcomes during the 8-week program. To examine how mindfulness impacted work outcomes, we used intraindividual modeling of the 8-week data. Mindfulness increased over time, and time also had indirect effects on emotional exhaustion, work engagement, and job satisfaction, through mindfulness. Supplementary growth curve analyses on the improvement of mindfulness over time showed a slight decrease in the positive effect of time on mindfulness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8101632/