Yoga At Work Becoming A Not-so-unusual Sight
In the business world, the buzzword these days is multi-tasking
. Dealing with a client on the phone, answering a seemingly endless stream of email and creating a spreadsheet are considered much-needed skills in the office of today. Its a juggling act that may increase productivity, but can also increase stress and strain.
Wouldnt it be great to throw yoga into that multi-tasking mix?
Many of today's top corporations are, indeed, adding yoga to the list of options for employees. With the ever-increasing importance of computers in the workplace, along with handheld devices that allow you to take the office with you anywhere, workers are becoming more stressed than ever in their quest to get the job done. But research is proving that a more stressed worker very often becomes a less productive worker. The solution: yoga in the office
As employees handle more and more tasks, and spend more and more time in the office, the question of how to keep them alert and productive has become an important issue for many employers. And yoga has emerged as a convenient, cost effective and universal way to achieve this goal.
In recent years, more and more corporations have begun scheduling yoga sessions in the workplace throughout the day, to accommodate those with different schedules. The classes may be held in an on-premises gym or a converted conference room, but regardless of location, yoga classes are being conducted in businesses of all sizes.
The beginnings of yoga in the workplace, as far as the U.S. is concerned, started approximately 25 years ago when the increase in health care for workers led many companies to created programs designed to promote well-being, such as smoking cessation programs, on-site gyms and yoga. While the original motivation was a health care cost-cutting measure, employers began to discover than yoga in the workplace also had the added benefit of reducing stress in workers.
According to the director of one trend analysis company, corporations began to understand that addressing an employees mental health is just as important as addressing their physical health. Elsewhere, a University of Massachusetts medical center report concluded that yoga, along with mediation sessions, actually reduced the amount of stress in workers and greatly improved their performance. And an Ohio State University study found that 20 minutes of instructor-led workplace yoga and meditation, along with at least one group session a week for six weeks, can lower stress by more than 12 percent and improve the quality of sleep in sluggish office workers.
The office surroundings are a perfect place for a yoga class, according to work researchers and yoga experts. They point to the often uncomfortable work environment - hard-backed chairs and the harsh computer glare - as well as the need to perform repetitive tasks. For many, lunch is a visit to the fast food restaurant down the street, last nights leftovers or a quick trip to the vending machine. This uncomfortable setting, combined with the pressure to meet deadline, take on new assignments that need to be done immediately, responding to hundreds of email messages and coping with the other mundane office tasks can make their stress levels rise dramatically.
To address this problem, several companies came up with the idea of bringing yoga into the office. For some corporations, it meant converting a space in their existing gym, while smaller companies managed to make their conference rooms and lunch areas serve a dual purpose, simply by moving tables and chairs to one side. It proved to be an entirely new way of life for many yoga instructors, who not only had to attempt meditation exercises with the whirr of a Coke machine in the background, but were also dealing with employees at different levels, from beginner to experienced, or who werent exactly dressed in traditional yoga clothing (think ties or work overalls).
But the benefits became apparent soon enough and the number of companies bringing yoga into the workplace grew steadily. Today, many modern corporations have regular paid yoga instruction in the work place in specially designated areas. For instance, Apple and Google have regularly scheduled yoga classes at their home offices at various times of the day, and even after work. And at their corporate headquarters in New York, HBO has not only addressed the demand for yoga classes at their offices, but been forced to add additional classes to meet the demand.
It may be impossible to get workers to scale back from the belief that multi-tasking at work is a must, and indeed many companies may be reluctant to get them to do so. But when it comes to coping with the stress that results from it, they may want to add yoga in the workplace to their to-do list.
by: Linda Adams
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