Nowadays in the fast-paced business world, employee well-being is more important than ever. But still, the focus tends to be on profitability and growth rather than on individual needs. This raises an important question: can simple techniques for maintaining mental and emotional health help improve team dynamics and enhance productivity?
Many business operations work under high-pressure environments of looming deadlines and ever-flowing work, a scenario that leaves very little room for personal welfare. This chronic pressure negates judgment, lowers employees’ performance, and leads to eventual burnout after some time. It is in such a setup that something as basic as paying attention to breathing becomes applicable; it is a surprisingly effective tool in dealing with stress and boosting general wellness at work.
One such rather relevant and rewarding breathing exercise is the ‘Emotional Clearing Breath.’ It comprises intentional, controlled, inspiratory, and expiratory processes. The aim is to reduce some of those residual negative feelings within oneself. These serve to clear the body and mind of stress so as to provide a more lucid mental frame and better emotional balance. The benefits are clear: improvement in general physical and mental health, with control over the nervous system. Just imagine, if at all, in a workplace, the workers take some time out to just breathe one day. That itself can alleviate stress and bring harmony to the workplace. The quality of working relationships will improve, as will team cooperation.
Besides stress reduction, breathing techniques have other major benefits that may be useful to an organisation. These techniques, when practiced habitually by employees, offer less emotional triggering and, therefore, less interpersonal conflict while also cementing personal relationships with other co-workers. This emotional self-regulation improves performance at the team level more thoroughly by providing harmony within an organisation, ensuring a harmonious and cooperative environment. Finally, these strengthened teams contribute toward improved productivity, enhanced decision-making, and faster response time. Viewed this way, promoting employee well-being is not just feel-good; it is strategic and has direct bottom-line effects.
Scientific research backs up the above claims. In this regard, one study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information established that controlled breathing activates the body’s “relaxation response.” This response neutralises the “fight or flight” system, usually set off by stress. It brings about a relaxing state in which cognitive functions are at their best, with increased attentiveness and decreased anxiety. Primarily, the workforce yields better results when the pressure is reduced and the task orientation is increased. A company investing in mental wellness programs such as conscious breathing finds its absenteeism reduced due to stress while productivity is increased to improve levels of engagement.
With the above advantages, including breathing techniques in the workplace should not be overly difficult.
An easy way to do this is to offer a few breathing breaks in the day and, in turn, encourage workers to take a few minutes for that specific purpose: to breathe deeply. It can be done through activities or virtually via a wellness app. You can also suggest to your employees that they take just a moment to focus on their breath. While most employers now provide ergonomic furniture and standing desks to maintain physical health, embedding breaks for mental wellness within this system may prove a natural next step in fostering a more whole and human-centred workforce environment.
Investing in such mental wellness programs goes beyond personal well-being; an organisation is also investing in long-term business success. If the employer actually cares about and supports employees, they are very likely to be loyal to the company, which reduces turnover.
The real human asset is to retain talent; hence, this element becomes much more vital in the fiercely fought job market. Employees spending time on mindfulness and stress reduction activity prove more resilient when things get tough and, hence, more flexible to take on dynamic business environments. This would then have the benefit, eventually, of leading to accelerated problem-solving, inventive creativity, and an overall heightened interest and commitment to organisational goals. For instance, other companies such as Google and LinkedIn also realise that meditation and mindfulness are part of corporate culture for mental well-being programs. This means that it is something which creates a working populace that becomes increasingly healthy and happy and which now transcends some of the most important propositions for employer branding in the world today. Paying attention to the well-being of their employees, these companies effortlessly create a positive circle: happy employees mean better performance, and better performance fuels business growth and success.
Work breathing exercises do not have to cost a lot of time or money. Resources can range from guided breathing mobile apps to having a wellness coach come on-site and lead employees in mindfulness exercises.
Individual culture and the needs of an organisation matter most. Therefore, a breathing program may need to be suitably tailored. Whereas some businesses may like a more formal approach incorporating scheduled wellness breaks and group breathing exercises, others prefer a freer model where employees can fit in breathing exercises whenever they feel like doing so during the day. More significantly, mental well-being has to be supported from the top and throughout the organisation as part of the core element, not an afterthought, to the heart of business strategy. Where this is understood and linked to productivity, there are ways that open for greater employee satisfaction, lowered levels of stress, and increased workforce engagement and resilience. Moreover, such initiatives have the potential to boost the reputation of the company, making it more attractive for both current employees and potential hires. Yet still, at the end of it all, profit and growth predominate in an organisation, but being able to enable the preservation of individual employee well-being through mindful breathing might make a remarkable difference to an individual and to the organisation. Incorporating mental health into the core of business will give an organisation a more committed and high-performance workforce that is well-placed to meet daily challenges thrown up by fast-moving business environments. Workforce initiatives aimed at mental health are investments not only in the employees but also in the future and long-term viability of the company as a whole.
