Can

Wellness Heal the Workplace?

She recalled visiting a “major hospital system” to help with a unit of doctors
who were dealing with an increasing error rate in their work. After she ran a
session for the team focused on compassion and “restoring meaning to
medicine,” she discovered that the unit was short seven staff members and
many employees were working double shifts.

“They very rightly said to me, ‘You could sit here and talk to us about
compassion all day long, it’s not going to make a difference in our stress
levels,’ ” Worline said. “No wellness management is going to work until you fix
the working conditions for people there. In that case, wellness programs were
a Band-Aid over a gaping wound.”

Still, Israel, the meditation expert, is confident that as stress levels in the
workplace increase, so will the demand for this kind of programming. Last
year, at a hospitality design conference in Hollywood, Florida, he presented in
front of hundreds of people from the industry.

“Ninety-five percent of the people in the room had never meditated or done
any of this before, and it was risky for the organizer to book me, but people
loved it,” he said. “In these more traditional spaces where people are not in
New York or Los Angeles, they’re starting to open up to this stuff.”

And through these sessions, some of them are finding practices they can
replicate on a more regular basis. Santulli, the office manager at WayUp, said
he would look into hosting a weekly mindfulness session for the whole staff.

“Stress and anxiety has been a big part of our life, and everything gets
overwhelming sometimes,” he said. “This was the first time in a long time that
I let go of this list of things I have to do, even for a moment.”

Closing
This article originally appeared in The New York Times on March 5, 2020.