The Benefits Of Meditation At Work

Here is yet another article that talks about "Benefits of Meditation" at work

The needs of business environment are fast demanding some techniques that can be incorporated to cater to the mental needs of the employees and executives. Tension, anxiety, and fatigue are common phenomenon that almost all the corporate sector is complaining about.The competition and market demand does not allow them to be moderate in their work. They need to work like machines. This is actually where the problem lies, and meditation at work can easily have its impact. Meditating at work can prove almost to be a panacea for work environment problems.... (Read the rest of the article here)

The summary "Benefits" seems to be "Increase in productivity" and "Improvement in performance". My take on this is, firstly this sounds like you are describing a machine, secondly Yes, we all know one needs to enter the inner sanctum to be at peace, weather at work or not. The goal of meditation cannot be anything else but meditation itself. Its a state of being, its not doing. It doesn’t matter how, when, where the individual finds time and place for his 3 minutes of silent self awareness. The silence remains with him for the rest of the day.

You are describing meditation as something, which is not being done in the work place today. You seem to be proposing an idea, which benefits a business. You imply that some kind of "Meditation Program" should be implemented in the work place? if so what? How? it is very difficult if not impossible to implement any kind of meditation program in most western office buildings. These are nothing more than "small places to put the resources" a collection of cubicles. The worker is just another resource who is put with any other office resources like the computer, telephone, desk, waste bin, stapler, pencils etc. Where is the place? Also, Where is the time? when do you propose to do this? Will bosses accept people sitting silently doing nothing, first thing in the morning after they arrive? say from 9.00 - 10.00 AM?

Sorry my friend, you are talking about an impossible situation. You are talking about using the classic “Invest-Monitor-Correct” techniques to implement something very personal. Meditation has incredible benefits for the individual true. How you propose to implement the solution seems to be by encouraging managers and business owners to "Invest" in another employee benefit and monitor if revenue and margins do improve. This will not work. The capital benefit has to go back to the individual for him to get motivated to perform any better than he already is.

The stress, strain, fatigue you describe are direct results of capitalism. We have accepted that we want to perform at higher levels, build better machines and deliver better products and services faster and cheaper. We are willing to work hard to achieve these because We want to get rich faster. We have setup performance based incentives for the employee in the hope that he will aim to perform better. We are the ones who want this situation. To keep up with our competition which could be from a different company, a different department, a different section of the same department or just the person in your next cubicle. We want to keep running; the race gets faster every minute so you have to run faster to remain where you are.
Yes, meditation will help up to a limit, like a psychotropic drug, to desensitize the mind. The limit in this case is purely physical. Once this limit is reached, the mind-body breaks down. The individual cannot perform any better. By insisting in staying in the rat race, you can only push this limit a bit higher and delay it a bit longer through meditation.

I feel, the whole premise for this discussion is wrong. Meditation cannot be misused as a tool to achieve higher monetary gains in business. Once an individual gets the fragrance of Meditation the whole structure of the societal rat race will seem irrelevant. You might end up completely losing an individual from the rat race!