Dr. Rich Fernandez on Bringing Mindfulness to the Workplace
It sounds like an overstatement, but we genuinely did use that kind of language. What we're pointing to is a collection of mental training practices, the sort of thing that usually gets grouped under the heading of mindfulness. With the more analytical crowds, we found it worked best to lean into the technical vocabulary and, more than that, to open with the science. The data, the published research, the studies: that was the starting point, and for those audiences it had to be.
Different groups need a different entry point. Take the populations whose work is built around other people. Starbucks, for instance, is one of the main clients at Wisdom Labs, and they run an enormous retail operation with a large base of employees working in stores. For that workforce, the human piece matters most. Connecting openly with other people, and with yourself, inside a fast retail environment is what counts. So with them we can walk straight in and talk about emotional intelligence and the skills tied to dealing with people, things like empathy and compassion.
Whatever the audience, bringing mindfulness and resilience into a business setting calls for the same mix. You want an approach grounded in science and research, and you blend that with something experiential and conceptual. I don't think you have to pick. You can have both.
Erik asked whether these companies were drawn to the training mainly because it could cut costs. That's part of it, yes, but only one part. There are several things holding this up at once. Reducing cost, healthcare cost among them, is one pillar. Another is just helping people perform at their best, optimizing and sustaining high performance along with employee well-being, since well-being feeds directly into engagement.
Engagement is the degree to which people feel purposeful and connected to the work they do. Decades of studies point to it as a strong signal of how an organization performs overall. So on one side you have cost. On the other you have performance and engagement. And the final piece is culture: being deliberate about the kind of organizational culture and leadership a company actually wants to grow.
Let me ground that in something concrete, because it can sound abstract otherwise. Starbucks brought us in partly because of their stated corporate values. Their mission is written down in plain terms, to inspire and nurture the human spirit one cup, one relationship, one neighborhood at a time. To get there, they name values like being present, being authentically connected, and communicating clearly and candidly with other people. Which raises the real question. How do you actually do any of that? What are the tools that support it?