The relationship between happiness and work came up again this week - and some new research gives is a particular slant: mindfulness and work, they say, don't go together.
There's a new editorial in the New York Times about mindfulness in the workplace. When employees meditation, apparently, it's not actually good for business. "Meditation was correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings of calm and serenity — states seemingly not conducive to wanting to tackle a work project," researchers Katherine Vohs and Andrew Hafenbrack explain in their essay, "Hey, Boss, You Don't Want Your Employees to Meditate."
Authors often have no say over the titles their articles are given, and this one sends a message that might be a little too clear: the article itself (here – you can read the abstract before you smack into the paywall) is a whole lot more ambiguous in its conclusions.
In it, they argue that meditation reduces people's motivation to engage in tedious and meaningless tasks. People didn't perform any worse, though, possibly because they weren't distracted by other thoughts or worries.
Happiness in the workplace in the US is a serious issue, and one that's gotten a good deal of thought.
What I'd Like to Ask These Business Experts
The research itself, with its appropriate level of nuance, doesn't bother me – but some of the assumptions the authors make about work do., The quote up there in the second paragraph should raise some big questions about the ways businesses think about their work environments.
1. All things being equal – and since mindfulness didn't effect productivity – why wouldn't businesses want employees experiencing "greater feelings of calm and serenity?"
2. In the research article, the authors explain, "While not tested here, it is possible that being in a mindful state made people realize how unimportant the experimental tasks were to them." They seem to be suggesting that this applies to the workplace as well as the lab. Why is the focus here on getting workers motivated to do things they don't care about, rather than finding ways to engage them?
The take-away from this seems to be that an anxious, un-self-actualized employee is, in some ways, better than one who's living life with a comfortable, mindful fullness. There was a time when employee satisfaction was taken as an important goal by many corporations. That time is, quite obviously, no longer here. There's been a subtle trade. Americans have exchanged satisfaction with life at work for the money to buy satisfaction outside of work. (And then gave up the a lot of the money, too.)
So: is the problem with the mindful worker, or with the job she finds herself in?
