How Meditation Can Help With Increasing Team Productivity

Companies these days are going through a massive shift thanks to the world being hit by a global pandemic. COVID-19 has managed to change the ways organizations are conducting their business, and employees are doing everything they can to keep their right to work from home. With the benefits remote working provides for remote workers, it’s no wonder many of them are interested in retaining the flexibility that comes with working from home.

However, several complications exist from working at home. If a remote employee has things they need to take care of at home, such as children or ill family members, the stress of balancing work and home life can be challenging. That issue could increase over time and cause the employee to start burning out and dropping their productivity.

Let’s not forget that most of your employees are also hard-working individuals. While not everyone has much to deal with at home compared to some of their other fellow employees, they can still burn themselves out from overdoing it. With the stress piling on top of your employee's minds, their usual productivity levels drop dramatically, and they can start resenting the job.

The only way your remote employees can improve and maintain their productivity is by reaching a peaceful state of mind. Of course, to achieve this tranquil mind, your workers need to start learning about meditation. Meditation is a state of mind where the person doesn't think about anything. This ancient practice has been used by millions of people throughout the world and has assisted many of them in several ways.

For this post, let us go over how meditation can help with increasing your remote team's productivity.

The impact of stress

Stress is a common factor that everyone has to deal with. Whether it's from family health or work-related, stress is a constant source in our daily lives. Remote employees are most likely dealing with a number of these issues. While stress does have some benefits, it can be largely disadvantageous, especially for work productivity. Stress has a significant impact on a person's physical and mental well-being, which reduces their productivity levels. Here are some signs that stress is negatively impacting your remote worker's productivity.

Lack of energy

While stress is known for providing a person with a burst of adrenaline, following that burst, it will swiftly drain the person of energy, which leaves them physically and emotionally drained. The lack of energy can prevent the worker from doing their best, which will severely impact their productivity.

Unfocused

To remain productive, your workers need to focus. However, stress will consume their minds, making it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the task at hand because they are focusing more on the source of their tension.

Constant worry

At times, people will become consumed with worry because of something that may have happened. Unfortunately, stress has a way of overtaking your time by making you continuously worry about something that may or may not occur. That loss of time could have been spent on remaining productive with work.

Decrease creativity

Constant stress causes a person's mind to wander, preventing them from coming up with innovative ideas. It limits the person's capability to think of creative solutions.

Negatively impacts personality

Stress not only impacts a person’s emotions and physical abilities, but it also impacts their personality. For example, an employee may snap at their colleagues without realizing that they are doing so, or they may become angry and yell at others without being aware of their action.

When it comes to remote working, teamwork is one of the most crucial aspects required to run a smooth remote team. If your remote workers are snapping at each other, overly moody, or outright yelling at their colleagues, it affects their ability to be productive. Plus, it impacts the productivity of the other remote employees.  

Reducing stress with meditation

As you can see, stress has a massive impact on your team's productivity. Fortunately, meditation is capable of helping manage this problem. Usually, when a person is mentally strained, the stress hormone Cortisol releases inflammation-promoting chemicals otherwise known as cytokines. That can cause a person's sleep to be disrupted and promotes anxiety, depression, and foggy thinking.

Meditation assists your remote team by regulating their sleep, controlling their cortisol hormone levels, and stimulating the release of happy hormones such as dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin. In fact, a study conducted by the Stanford University School of Medicine discovered that meditation causes a 30% reduction in stress-related symptoms. That will lead to your remote employees feeling stress-free, which in turn allows them to remain highly productive.

Calms the mind

When a person meditates frequently, they learn how to direct their attention and gain control of their emotional impulses. The temptation to spend time looking through social media posts, or walking away from work and watching TV for a while, will be entirely ignored. Meditation can assist your remote workers with keeping their mind and emotions calm, which is grease useful for increasing their focus on their tasks. The better they can focus on their work, the more productive they become.

Improves happiness

Positive emotions are crucial for the human psyche since it allows us to keep our minds more clear. According to a study done by the University of Warwick, productivity levels can increase somewhere between 12% to 20% if the workers are overall happy.

While we have already touched on how meditation reduces stress, the University of North Carolina conducted a study that shows a more direct connection between a particular type of meditation known as loving-kindness meditation and positive emotions. The study has revealed a direct connection between time spent meditation and a person’s scope for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negative emotions. Even the subjects who only underwent three weeks of meditation for 20-minutes per day showed signs of slight improvements than those who were not meditating.

Better relationships

Relationships are crucial in the business world, especially when your team is made up of remote workers. If your remote employees are incapable of getting along and reaching out to each other in times of need, productivity will worsen. Collaboration is required to accomplish most of the tasks and goals set before them. Having a team of remote workers incapable of even speaking to each other more openly will harm the entire operation.

Unfortunately, most organizations tend to take the importance of relationships for granted and believe that collaboration and teamwork is a trainable skill with the belief that only some workers are better at it than others. Researchers are already figuring out how the effects of mindfulness can impact a team's working relationships. It suggests that perhaps the interpersonal benefits of improving the team's mindfulness could be a beneficial method for improving team collaboration.

An excellent remote team is required if you wish to continue to achieve the outstanding results you were getting from your on-site counterparts. Meditation is capable of playing a significant role in assisting with enabling better communication and understanding, which boosts interpersonal relationships. Conducting meditation sessions will not only increase relationships between team members. It also encourages engagement and improves mental health for everyone. That will lead to improved productivity, along with other benefits.

Decision-making

The ability to make decisions at the workplace can make a person a better leader and provide several benefits for both the team and the organization. Most people make tons of decisions each day, so knowing why decision-making is crucial and improving your team's decision-making process can improve work productivity. Since the most significant choices are created in the prefrontal cortex, it stands to reason that mindfulness is excellent assistance in making better choices.

While it is a challenging topic to qualify and measure, the University of Pennsylvania has discovered that mindfulness can reduce biased decision-making. By highlighting temporal relations and introducing a sharper and objective standpoint, meditation bolsters the person's mind from making biased decisions.

Simple virtual meditation practices

Meditation is a simple exercise that has the individual sit comfortably and centers their mind. It is a technique that can assist with remaining focused on the task at hand. Of course, it may be challenging to find the best time to practice meditation, especially for remote workers. But there are some simple techniques that they can use to calm themselves and increase their productivity. Meditation is a versatile technique that can be practiced in several ways. All it requires is to take a short pause from work. Here are some ways you can get your remote employees started on meditation.

Counting breaths

A five-minute meditation technique that requires you to take a deep breath while counting the breath. The purpose of this technique is to ease the mind throughout the day. It merely requires the employee to sit in a comfortable position and break in and out. It’s one of the easiest ways to destress and meditate.

Music Meditation

Music meditation is a method that can be practiced as a group or alone. When performed together through a virtual call, it provides a collective calmness that spreads throughout the entire remote team. Although, it can be practiced solo for a short amount of time each day to assist with managing stress levels and improving focus.

Conclusion

Meditation can have a significant impact on your remote team. The stress that comes from working off-site is real. If you do not carefully manage your team's mental health, productivity will start to decline at a rapid pace. Take the time to introduce your team to the power of meditation and see them thrive into a cohesive and productive team.