How Can Companies Foster Mindfulness in Remote Workers?

An individual employee’s mental health status has an important bearing on the overall team performance at the organizational level, making it desirable for organizations to prioritize employee mental well-being. Mindfulness interventions have demonstrated benefits towards improving physical, mental, and general health of employees, besides offering interpersonal benefits that result in positive team interactions. Moreover, promoting mindfulness at the team level has the potential to further improve the workplace climate and ensure psychological safety among employees.

Now, however, the rise of remote work after the COVID-19 pandemic has not only created new challenges to employee mental well-being, but also necessitated newer ways of delivering mindfulness interventions among remote workers. Though on-demand mindfulness applications can especially be helpful for facilitating intervention access to remote workers, not much is known about their usefulness in promoting team mindfulness at the remote workplace.

Against this backdrop, a new study of remote workers in the US now reveals the impact of an employer-provided meditation app on team mindfulness and psychological safety among remote workers. To this end, the researchers studied perceptions of over 400 full-time remote workers who had received the subscription of ‘Calm’ – a web and mobile meditation app offering guided meditations, practice sessions, breathing exercises, and sleep-related useful content.

Of these, only about 20% remote workers reported having opportunities to use the Calm app at work, and an even smaller proportion reported using the app with other team members. Nonetheless, workers who used the app with other team members perceived their teams to be more mindful and had greater perceptions of psychological safety. Moreover, perceptions of psychological safety were high in workers who discussed the app’s content with other team members, compared with those who did not.

These findings reveal that employer-provided opportunities to foster app-based mindfulness interventions among remote workers are currently lacking. However, they also suggest the usefulness of mobile-based interventions in promoting perceptions of team mindfulness and psychological safety among remote workers.

Thus, even as remote workplace settings continue to evolve, employers must make efforts to promote team mindfulness and psychological safety and communicate their support for increasing remote workers’ engagement via app-based mindfulness interventions.

Link to the original journal article:
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/eohp/4/1/4_2022-0001-OA/_article