HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
CORPORATE ZEN
wide and claims $300 million in
annual revenues. So, too, is the
scene in the meditation class, Promega executives assert.
“You create a culture of wellness,” says Promega’s chief medical officer, Ashley G. Anderson
Jr. “If you create a culture in
which vibrant physicality is an
admired thing, you’ve achieved a
lot. A healthy workforce is a productive workforce.”
Across a widening swath of the
American corporate landscape,
meditation, yoga and other practices once confined to the bohemian fringes are emerging as new
techniques toward the harvesting
of profit. Promega is among the
increasing ranks of companies that
have come to embrace so-called
mindfulness activities — concentrated meditation aimed at sharpening focus and reducing stress —
in a bid to improve the well-being
of their workforces and, by extension, the bottom line.
This is no gut-level gamble. A
growing body of research suggests
that yoga and meditation may reduce the stress that tends to assail bodies confined to desks for
hours at a time. Companies are
investing in the notion that limiting stress will translate into fewer
VERY
E
COMPANY
KNOWS THAT
IF THEIR
PEOPLE HAVE
[‘EMOTIONAL
INTELLIGENCE’],
THEY’RE
GONNA MAKE
A SHITLOAD
OF MONEY.
employee absences, lower healthcare costs and higher morale, encouraging workers to stick around.
Many of the companies that
have launched such programs have
stripped meditation of any hint of
Eastern spiritual provenance, reducing it to a management elixir
aimed at capturing the full potential of the people cashing the
paychecks. Chade-Meng Tan, a
widely celebrated Silicon Valley
meditation teacher whose specially
designed unit, Search Inside Yourself, has been taught to more than
1,000 Google employees, describes
the objective as cultivating “emotional intelligence,” or EI.
“Everybody knows this EI thing