Creating Mindfulness at Stressed Environment Work-Places through a Self-Training Intervention

Abstract

Does it take a pandemic to make us realize when our mind is full of anxiety and when we need to protect ourselves by being alert in a state of mindfulness at stressed environment workplaces? With an explosion of scholarly interest in the concept of mindfulness and its uniqueness from the allied concepts in management learning, the effectiveness of organizational mindfulness interventions need further investigation (Reb and Atkins, 2015). There is a lack of convenient and effective mindfulness interventions that could be applied at the futuristic workplaces (Lomas et al., 2017). We attempt to design and test a self-training mindfulness intervention. In this paper we discuss at the outset the importance of mindfulness in constantly evolving organizations and then outline our research study where the effectiveness of the designed self-training intervention is statistically tested. Our intervention comprises of a 4-week module that was introduced among a group of 117 respondents that included doctors, nurses and medical staff from a government hospital. Their mindfulness scores were recorded before and after the implementation of the 4 weeks’ intervention module using the MAAS (Mindfulness Attention and Awareness Scale). The results indicate that the mindfulness intervention caused a significant increase in the mindfulness quotient enhancing overall employee wellbeing. This intervention can be an important tool in enhancing the wellbeing of employees in current organizations that are shrouded by high levels of uncertainty and stress.