The following is an article by Arianna Huffington for Huffington Post. It is a very interesting article that stresses the benefits of meditation and how that translates to profit and loss for companies. She reports that improving employees' happiness is the key to their work performance and health problems. Imagine if Buddha's teachings are also incorporated into the programs? The benefits will be tremendous.
"According to the World Health Organization, the cost of stress to American businesses is as high as $300 billion. And unless we change course, this will only get worse. Over the last 30 years, self-reported levels of stress have increased 18 percent for women and 25 percent for men.
This has huge consequences, of course, because of the role stress plays in a wide array of illnesses. Like high blood pressure, which afflicts nearly 70 million, and which costs $130 billion a year to treat. Or diabetes, which 25 million Americans have.
The CDC estimates that 75 percent of all health care spending is on chronic illnesses like these that can be prevented. According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, two-thirds of visits to the doctor's office are for stress-related conditions. As a panelist on health care at the World Economic Forum put it this year, what we have right now isn't health care but "sickcare." And sickcare is a lot more expensive than real health care. Especially for businesses.
As business professors Michael Porter, Elizabeth Teisberg, and Scott Wallace wrote in the HBS Working Knowledge, studies show that U.S. employers spend 200 to 300 percent more for the indirect costs of health care -- in the form of absenteeism, sick days, and lower productivity -- than they do on actual health care payments. Their recommendation: that companies "mount an aggressive approach to wellness, prevention, screening and active management of chronic conditions."
Though awareness is growing, there are still too many companies that don't yet realize the benefits of a focus on wellness. "The lack of attention to employee needs helps explain why the United States spends more on health care than other countries but gets worse outcomes," wrote Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. "We have no mandatory vacation or sick day requirements, and we do have chronic layoffs, overwork, and stress. Working in many organizations is simply hazardous to your health." And thus to the health of your company as well. "I hope businesses will wake up to the fact that if they don't do well by their employees, chances are they're not doing well, period," Pfeffer said. .......
One of the best -- and cheapest -- ways to become healthier and happier is through mindfulness exercises like meditation. Mark Williams is a professor of clinical psychology at Oxford, an expert in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, and the co-author of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World. According to Williams, after nine weeks of training, participants in a mindfulness program had "an increased sense of purpose and had fewer feelings of isolation and alienation, along with decreased symptoms of illness as diverse as headaches, chest pain, congestion and weakness."
In fact, the health effects of meditation can be even more dramatic -- a matter of life and death. Williams points to a National Institutes of Health study that showed a 23 percent decrease in mortality, a 30 percent decrease in death due to cardiovascular problems and a big decrease in cancer mortality as well. "This effect is equivalent to discovering an entirely new class of drugs (but without the inevitable side effects)," they write....
One company that "gets it," and has since its inception, is Google. One of the most popular classes it offers employees is known as S.I.Y., short for "Search Inside Yourself." It was started by Chade-Meng Tan, engineer, Google employee number 107, and the author of Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace). The course has three parts: attention training, self-knowledge, and building useful mental habits. "I'm definitely much more resilient as a leader," Richard Fernandez, a director of executive development who took Tan's course, told the New York Times. "It's almost an emotional and mental bank account. I've now got much more of a buffer there." ...
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/corporate-wellness_b_2903222.html] [url]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/corporate-wellness_b_2903222.html[/url]
