How Mindfulness and Positive Thinking Can Help Employees
Mindfulness and positive thinking are strongly linked to a healthy sense of wellbeing, but it can enhance productivity too. Employers that encourage a positive mindset will not only be cultivating a healthier workplace culture, but potentially better performing employees. We look at how mindfulness techniques can be used to improve focus, as well as mental and physical health.
Today’s workplace can be busy and stressful, and it’s important to support your employees so they can avoid burnout. When people are constantly facing demanding situations, they could feel overwhelmed, and their stress levels may rise. If left unchecked, this can lead to bad decisions and poor mental health. Negative thoughts can easily spiral into anxiety, affecting the way an employee thinks and communicates to customers and colleagues.
“Research has shown that on average we think 60,000 thoughts per day and of those thoughts, about 75 per cent are negative, driven by the primitive survival areas of our brains that govern stress responses like fight or flight and can make us more irritable and impatient.”
Noa Belling, Author - Stress Less: Managing Anxiety in a Modern World
There is a direct correlation between stress and poor physical health too. When people are under a sustained amount of stress and feel unable to cope, this can reduce their immune system, causing them to fall ill. By improving your employees’ mental well-being, you might also reduce absenteeism in the business.
Creating a positive mindset
Mindfulness is a way of bringing people back into the current moment. By living in the moment, people can often gain a clearer perspective on the problem they are facing. This also helps them to monitor their own reactions, so they can react differently to the problem.
Studies show that mindfulness can help to reduce people’s stress and help them to regulate their behaviours. From both a business and personal perspective, there are various benefits to practising mindfulness. These include building emotional resilience, improving concentration levels and communication, and enhancing people’s overall well-being.
When people have a more positive mindset, this can create a ripple effect across the team. Relationships can be strengthened, resulting in more empathetic and engaged employees. Using mindful approaches, you can embrace curiosity to increase creativity and innovation.
At Invictus HR, we use a deck of mindfulness cards in our face-to-face facilitation sessions. The aim is to encourage positive discussions and every person gets the chance to lead on their chosen topic. The cards are categorised and each one has a question, which forms the basis of our discussions. A person chooses a card at random and then writes down their answer within 5 minutes.
Working from table to table, each team member shows their card and answer, which then generates discussion, as everyone else contributes their answers. Everyone has the opportunity to lead and facilitate discussions on their chosen topic within a maximum of 10 minutes.
We recently ran this as a session with our client’s team at their staff conference and received warm feedback from everyone who participated. Let’s look at the different categories covered in these cards more closely.
Example questions for mindfulness sessions
Below are several examples of the types of questions you could ask your employees in one-to-one feedback sessions or team meetings. They are useful discussion points to generate positive discussions and thinking, which will help to engage your teams.
What can your employees do to appreciate themselves?
You could suggest discussions based around self-care and activities that allow them to enjoy some quality time.
How can employees appreciate others?
They might share examples of how they carried out an act of kindness to support a colleague, friend or a family member.
What can be appreciated from a wider perspective?
This could cover other positive actions in the wider world such as charitable or community support.
How can employees choose to see things differently?
You could discuss how a seemingly negative situation could be viewed from a positive perspective, such as providing important learnings.
How can employees increase self-awareness?
As well as discussions on positive thinking, there are various mindfulness techniques that can be used to encourage employees to live in the moment.
What measures can they do to create change?
This could cover workplace factors, as well as personal changes that will help the employee to embrace a more positive mindset.
Mindfulness is a tool for employee engagement
Employers that encourage mindfulness will be cultivating a healthy workplace culture. As a result, employees will be more engaged and able to tackle business-critical activities and approach problems. Positive thinking and fresh perspectives could help you to achieve key business objectives and accelerate growth through greater productivity and innovation.
Invictus HR can help you develop employee engagement strategies, as well as facilitating mindfulness sessions with your teams. We also provide retained HR support for a range of businesses and support with ad hoc HR projects.
For strategies on employee engagement, mindfulness or HR advice, please get in touch.
Sources:
https://positivepsychology.com/mindfulness-at-work/
https://www.corporatewellnessmagazine.com/article/the-benefits-of-mindfulness-for-employees