IN a conference room at Yahoo!’s Midtown headquarters, a group of marketing and research staffers have gathered for a Friday afternoon meeting. But nobody is bemoaning the bottom line, stealing glances at BlackBerrys, stifling yawns or talking about “adding value” or “thinking outside the box.”
Nobody is even sitting down – tables and chairs have been cleared aside – and everyone is barefoot.
“Stop micromanaging yourself,” commands the leader, Tevis Gale, a yoga instructor who will spend the next hour leading nearly a dozen employees through classic postures such as downward-facing dog and warrior pose – “a good counter to the computer pose,” notes Beth Lawrence, the dot-com’s vice president of ad sales.
If a millenniums-old spiritual practice seems out of place in a business office, Yahoo!, which offers yoga to its city employees twice a week, is in good company. The number of companies turning to meditation and yoga to soothe a stressed-out workforce has jumped in recent years, from real estate firms to the city Fire Department.
The publishing firm Rodale has a yoga studio built into its Midtown office. At Eileen Fisher, whose namesake designer is a devoted meditator, meetings begin with a few minutes of silence for collecting thoughts. Staid firms such as Morgan Stanley and PricewaterhouseCoopers have offered training in yoga, meditation and other de-stressing techniques, and even hard-charging hedge funders are sneaking in some inner peace between deals.
Such programs are becoming “hugely commonplace,” says Jon Kabat-Zinn, a University of Massachusetts Medical School professor who’s studied meditation in the workplace. “They might have at one point been thought to be a luxury, but I think it’s becoming well-recognized that it’s a necessity.”
Companies that agree are turning to traditional studios, such as Om yoga center in Union Square, to bring classes onsite, or to firms specializing in corporate wellness, like Namaste New York, or Gale’s Balance Integration Corp., whose growing client roster includes Viacom and Disney. Meanwhile, corporate meditation coaches like Mark Thornton, who caters to top-level managers, are in growing demand.
“The bottom line is people are more stressed and busy than ever before,” says Thornton – and corporate types are discovering that something once thought “weird and foreign and hippie” can fight stress.
Kabat-Zinn, the founding director of the UMass’ Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society, points out the numerous benefits the practices bring to the workplace: improved work ethic, better health, sharper communication skills, a stimulated imagination.
And science backs him up. In a 1997 study, Kabat-Zinn examined two groups of stressed-out employees at a Wisconsin biotech company. One group was trained in meditation and practiced regularly. After eight weeks, scans revealed increased activation in the left part of their brains – the side associated with well-being and happiness. While the study didn’t measure job performance, the meditators reported improvements in their work.
Other research has pointed out the health benefits of regular meditation and yoga practice, including a University of Kentucky study released this month showing that Transcendental Meditation – a form of meditation that settles the mind – can help control high blood pressure.
With results like these, firms are viewing yoga and meditation classes not just as perks and a way to boost morale, but as means of preventive care and a path to more productive employees.
“It allows for more focus and creativity, because they’ve cleared out some of the excess stressors,” says Fritz Maier, vice president of human resources at The Economist Group, where Balance Integration recently conducted a stress-management seminar.
From harried to healeR
Some of those who lead such programs have plenty of firsthand experience with workplace stress. With his gentle voice and serene demeanor, Thornton is the epitome of calm. But he hasn’t always been this way. He was once, as he puts it, “a hyped-up, caffeine-addicted stress junkie.” As a 26-year-old investment banker at JP Morgan, he would grind his teeth in his sleep. Then his hair started falling out from stress.
At that rate, Thornton says, “I was going to be bald and toothless by 30.”
So he used his vacation time to travel to India, where he learned to meditate. When he returned, he found ways to incorporate meditation into his workday – and continued to climb the ladder, landing a position as chief operating officer.
On one particularly rough day, a co-worker asked how he could be so calm in such chaos. Hoping to cultivate a more peaceful workplace, Thornton was inspired to write a book, “Meditation in a New York Minute: Super Calm for the Super Busy.”
Today he teaches corporate meditation full-time, in group and individual sessions where he discusses the science behind meditation, explains the practice and leads guided exercises. His clients include Deloitte & Touche and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
“Many people think to live a spiritual life you have to lose your job, wear saffron robes, light incense and sit cross-legged in a cave,” says Thornton, who dresses business casual. “I’m passionate about what works for busy people who aren’t going to leave their jobs and go live in the Himalayas.”
Like Thornton, Gale is a veteran corporate warrior, having spent 13 years in development and marketing at companies such as Coca-Cola, UPS and AOL. During a stretch of several years when she was traveling constantly, often sleeping on flights to and from Latin America, colleagues marveled at her stamina – which Gale attributed to her regular yoga practice. Hoping to help others balance their lives, in 2001 she founded Balance Integration, which provides corporate yoga, meditation and stress-reduction seminars.
“Those of us who are driven by passion can be driven to the point of burning out, and oftentimes not even realize what we’re doing,” she says. “We often can’t see the warning signs that, ‘Gosh, I need to stop and recharge.’ “
In Gale’s classes, candles, chants and other trappings of traditional yoga practice are nowhere to be found. In the corporate setting, the practical trumps the esoteric, which is why she uses such decidedly non-yogic terms as “micromanaging,” and “multitasking.”
“Corporate yoga is outreach, so you have to speak in terms that are relevant to what corporate people are worried about,” she says.
Boulos Harb, a software engineer at Google who practices yoga at work at least once a week, says the classes have made a noticeable difference in his work performance. He particularly likes the midweek class, which combats the stress that’s accumulated by that point in the workweek.
“The next morning, I wake up refreshed and I work much better,” he says.
Marcus Tarrant, a manager at PwC who’s attended yoga classes for about a year, isn’t so sure his work has improved. But he says he feels better physically, and appreciates having it so nearby.
“It’s great that we have it onsite,” he says. “It’s very convenient.”
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
As common as workplace programs have become, some companies and executives still prefer to keep mum on the topic. One Manhattan financial adviser who recently began meditating asked that his name not be used, and says he hasn’t told his colleagues.
“It’s just a personal matter that you do for yourself,” he says.
Certainly there are some who might chuckle at the notion of overdriven New Yorkers taking a break from chasing achievement to get in touch with their core. But the whole point, says Thornton, who works with many a time-strapped executive, is that would-be meditators need not make major life changes.
“All of us walk down the street, commute, eat lunch, shower,” he says. “When you have the right tools, those times can be powerful moments to start to do inner transformation.”
And those who bring such practices into the workplace are willing to make their own adjustments. For instance, at a typical yoga studio, a ringing cellphone would elicit a withering stare, but Michael Wald, CEO of Namaste New York, doesn’t mind if clients discreetly glance at a buzzing PDA to see if they need to take a call.
Thornton, on the other hand, asks his clients to live without their BlackBerrys for 15 minutes during meditation. Sometimes it’s not exactly an aid in the search for inner calm – executives can become visibly agitated from the withdrawal, he says.
It’s one example of how Corporate America and meditation can still prove strange bedfellows, says Thornton.
But, he says, “we’re getting more intimate with each other.”