The word “mindfulness” gets thrown around a lot in corporate sectors as a cop out for employers to avoid actually doing things to improve work conditions and as a manipulative tool to increase productivity at the expense of their employees. However, there is no doubt that mindfulness practices can improve work satisfaction for employees, leading to improved performance.

University of Exeter published a study in Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology that found that more mindful employees found their jobs less monotonous and less likely to quit.

For their study, they recruited 174 blue-collar workers whose job was to process discount coupons. Due to the jobs highly repetitive nature, it is considered highly monotonous. They first employed a six-point mindfulness attention awareness scale to measure the employees’ mindfulness ability. Four weeks later, the researchers assessed the subjects’ boredom and work attitudes. After four months, the researchers then collected data that reported the volume of coupons counted and number of errors from each employee.

The found that higher baseline mindfulness at the beginning of the study lead to decreased boredom, higher quality of work, and less likely to quit due to greater job satisfaction. However, it is also important to note that higher mindfulness, while lead to higher quality of work, did lead to a reduced quantity of work.

However, author of the study, Andreas Wihler did point out:

Mindfulness helps employees in monotonous jobs to be more satisfied. But organizations would be ill-advised to rely on mindfulness for making boring work conditions bearable. Organizations are still responsible for resolving structural and organizational deficits through work redesign.

Unfortunately, corporate leadership are ill-informed of the true underlying meanings and use of mindfulness at their unfruitful attempts to overwork their employees to maximize profits. This study shows that mindfulness while increase quality, it can lead to reduced quantity. However, the job satisfaction of an employees and the quality of work is better tradeoff than having more work done.

Therefore, it is of a great disservice for corporate leadership to treat “mindfulness” as some sort of fix all for structural problems in the work place. As for employees, it behooves you to pick up practice mindfulness practice for your own benefit, not your job or for your employer.

A Wihler et al. It’s so boring—or is it? Examining the role of mindfulness for work performance and attitudes in monotonous jobs, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.  DOI: 10.1111/joop.12370