The Unthinkable Path

In the corporate environment, prosperity is almost unthinkingly associated with “hard” variables: market share, sales, or profit. “Thrive” is the name of one of our clients ‘ wellness program. Thrive and wellness? In this case the client decided to walk the path considering people. How? Doing some specific activities with the employees. The purpose of these is to account for the benefits that can be achieved by introducing, among many others, mindfulness in the company and train employees to change some habits that cause discomfort. What would Mindfulness be? It’s a technique that allows you to reduce pressure, stress, and improve your skills to relate to other people, whether they are friends, colleagues or clients. It has been shown to be effective in improving both mental health and job performance and, among other issues, is related to prevention against depression, resilience to stress, an improvement in the relationship between diet and overweight, and even it was shown to serve as a possible approach to insomnia.

So, two years ago, I started attending, every three months,  an event in Montevideo called the Thrive Week. During that week, I stay in the hotel and they create an agenda with various activities, such as talks about healthy habits, physical training on the rambla of Montevideo, yoga classes at different times for the employees from all shifts to attend, visiting sectors of the hotel for active breaks, individual talks on healthy habits.

In the talks, various causes that alter well-being are mentioned (stress and its daily demands, how excessive thoughts disturb the balance, the toxicity of complaints and their influence on physical and emotional health, how to eat, sleep changes) and, for all these issues, different options or “ways to prosper” are provided to achieve a more harmonious life.

Workouts are about physical and aerobic structure -both forms generate well-being. They explain how you should train and what things are essential to be in good physical condition. In yoga meetings, in addition to practicing stretching, they seek to learn the different types of breathing. The idea is to delve into the spiritual part. This also translates into the incorporation of the active pause. The reason for active breaks is to instruct people not to go through their daily activities without stretching after prolonged and repetitive movements. For example, finance clerks who do not move all day, or maintenance workers who are constantly on the go. The purpose is to have the initiative to modify the usual routine to avoid discomfort.

The counseling talks are individual so that each person tells how they live, how they eat, if they sleep well, how they train, and what their schedules are like. It is about organizing the way of living.  As in any other corporate activity, there is always a metric that allows us to measure results. The company asks for feedback to know the state of the members of the organization and a detailed description is made of what was observed during that week. However, tangible results come beyond the metrics report. With one of those weeks, the long-term benefits of the proposed techniques in a daily application can already be observed: it improves the management of complex or stressful situations, without feeling nervous; it favors emotional intelligence, creativity and innovation over our mathematical intelligence, our most rational side; it allows to gain clarity for conflict resolution and decision making; it promotes better communication between colleagues and, mainly, reduces the level of anxiety and thus gives way to calm and stability.

As a consequence, the energy levels and productivity increase. And so, we arrive at the final metric, the one that marks this “prosperity,” not at the expense of people but based on their physical, emotional and work balance