Does it Pay Off? The True R.O.I. of Mindfulness in Business

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT B THE CHANGE/ EXCERPTED FROM DAVID GELLES’ MINDFUL WORK

Mindfulness — the practice of focusing on the present — is a growing trend within businesses. Leaders who provide mindfulness resources for their employees often recognize decreased levels of stress and increased productivity among their workforce. In Mindful Work (Eamon Dolan, 2016), David Gelles digs into the subject of mindfulness in business, revealing evidence to support its benefits and real-world examples of companies who are seeing results. The following excerpt about mindfulness in business has been excerpted from Chapter 7: “Socially Responsible.”

But can pursuing the greater good be good for the bottom line? That’s the vision of mindful company Aetna and other big companies that are led by mindful leaders, and they’re beginning to calculate their return on investment when it comes to mindfulness. Take the study Aetna did with Duke. One of the findings was that highly stressed employees incur an additional $2,000 per year in health care costs, compared to their less-stressed peers. Scaled across a large company, this quickly amounts to millions of dollars a year in stress-related charges. And while it’s hard to draw a direct causal connection, Aetna is already starting to see results. Health care costs at the company — which total more than $90 million a year — are going down. In 2012, as the mindfulness programs ramped up, health care costs fell 7 percent. That’s $6.3 million going straight to the bottom line, partly thanks to mindfulness training, it appears. Not all of that is attributable to meditation, of course. But stress exerts a tax on an organization — in terms of both productivity and health care costs. Reducing stress, therefore, is going to help the bottom line. Aetna figures the productivity gains alone amounted to $3,000 per employee, an 11-to-one return on its investment. That’s an impressive ROI for any program. While mindfulness may not always be 100 percent free, especially when sold as an offering by a large health insurer, it is certainly cheap.

These initial results are enough to inspire Bertolini to press on, despite some reservations about offering meditation as medicine. He’s understandably wary of coming off as proselytizing. “Introducing these concepts into the workplace without making it feel like they’re learning Buddhism or Hinduism or whatever or a religious thing is a very fine line to walk,” he said. “You have to choose your words right.” But the upside is too great as he sees it. If he can improve the productivity and health of his employees, all while saving his company money with a low-cost application, that outweighs any reputational risks. “All that we’ve done isn’t that expensive,” he said. “It’s probably cost us $120,000 a year to do this. If you save one life, who gives a shit about the money? If you prevent four people from becoming diabetic, we’ve done an enormously powerful thing.”

The benefits of a more mindful workforce can’t be quantified in dollar terms alone, but sound economic data to back up the anecdotal evidence will certainly help get mindfulness into more offices more quickly. Now imagine if not just Aetna, but all health care companies were incorporating mindfulness into their own corporate cultures and offering it to their customers.

Bertolini demonstrated the power of one executive, motivated by mindfulness, to do right by his employees and customers. It remains one of the biggest corporate experiments with mindfulness gone right. Bertolini may soon have company. Though he was able to effect change on his own, discovering practice as a remedy for his own suffering and taking steps to scale mindfulness within Aetna, other executives are taking deliberate steps to become more mindful. They are being drawn to the practicality of the emerging field known as mindful leadership, and they are seeking out knowledge and training wherever they can find it. And for some, that means heading to a former Christian monastery on the banks of the Hudson River.