Making time for mindfulness and how to survey your employees… properly – what you need to know

Hello, and welcome to?New Scientist’s Business Insights newsletter. I’m Chris Stokel-Walker and in this week’s edition, we’re uncovering the latest scientific research affecting business that you ought to know about.

Why mindfulness matters

Workplace stress is a major drag for employers and the wider economy. The UK’s workplace regulator, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE),?recorded 914,000 cases ?of work-related stress, depression or anxiety in the 2021/22 year. In total, that added up to 17 million working days lost due to one of these three issues, accounting for around half of all days of absence due to work-related sickness.

Of course, stress levels were high at this time due to the coronavirus pandemic, but even data from 2018/19 shows almost 13 million working days lost to these conditions.

However you measure it, it is a big problem. “Stress and poor mental health is the number one cause of work-related ill health,” says Sarah Albon, HSE’s chief executive. “The effects of stress, depression and anxiety can have a significant impact on an employee’s life and on their ability to perform their best at work.”

So how can employers help alleviate the impact of stress, depression and anxiety? Mindfulness, say Mariana Toniolo-Barrios and Lieke ten Brummelhuis at Simon Fraser University, Canada. The pair?asked ?116 workers across a number of industries whether they practised mindfulness and what impact it had on their stress levels at work.

It turned out those who practised mindfulness were less likely to be daunted by their work. “It is possible to have different outlooks on work tasks,” says ten Brummelhuis. “A task can feel like a threat, a difficult hurdle that you are reluctant to take on. Or you can view it as a challenge – something that might be difficult, but not impossible, to tackle and offers an opportunity to perform well.” Those who think of it as the latter report being less stressed than the former.

Therefore, to try to reduce stress, they recommend introducing mindfulness opportunities into the workplace.

Our survey says…

Staff members are often kept on track with regular career progression meetings, where managers appraise their work over the past year and set targets for the coming 12 months. But managing the managers – and seeing if they’re doing a good job – is a trickier task.

Many companies rely on employee surveys to take the temperature of their staff. But their efficacy has been questioned in?a new study ?by Mengying Li and Bryan Acton at Binghamton University School of Management.

“Instead of capturing actual leader behaviours, ratings might simply reflect whether a person likes their leader,” says Li. Survey design is largely to blame for ineffectual feedback on managers. The questions asked, the researchers say, are often too vague and require staff to delve deep into their memories to recall events that happened a long time ago. That can unnaturally sway people to provide more positive responses to bosses than they actually feel.

“People may just generally experience more of the positive stuff and are less likely to recall specifically negative leadership behaviours, especially if they’re overall happy in their workplace,” says Li.

The researchers also analysed whether asking staff if they like their managers is a good metric to gauge the managers’ performance.?

Perceptions of a leader as good doesn’t necessarily mean they are – and so more pointed questions about issues that could boost or derail a business are important to ask, they found.

The downside of DEI

Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) has become an ever-increasing part of a business’s operations. The number of people titled “head of diversity” on LinkedIn has doubled between 2015 and 2020, with more than half of companies on the Standards & Poor’s (S&P) 500 listing of leading companies having a chief diversity officer.

But despite diversity literally being in their job title, people’s preconceived view of what a chief diversity officer looks like is often narrowminded,?according to a study ?by Rebecca Paluch at the University of British Columbia and Vanessa Shum at Simon Fraser University, both in Canada.

The pair asked around 500 people to say what race they believed a fictional company’s head of finance would be and what race the company’s head of diversity would be. “Even though the new leader had a generic name and description, people were significantly more likely to assume the finance leader would be white, while the EDI leader would be non-white,” says Paluch.??

In further experiments, study participants said that non-white candidates were more likely to be committed to social justice and that non-white candidates were recommended more often for EDI jobs than white ones. “It’s never good to hire based on biased presumptions. We can't assume things about people just because of the way they look,” says Paluch.

Socially minded

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) has rightly shot up the priority list for business leaders in the past decade or so. It should be an unabashedly, unapologetically good thing that companies do at any time – preferably, the sooner the better. But business is more complicated than that.

An analysis ?by Inchan Kim at the University of New Hampshire and Brandon McNeil, is at Fidelity Investments, a financial services corporation in New Hampshire finds that the halo effect for businesses, measured in terms of returns on their share price, is linked to the broader political and societal backdrop. US companies that unveiled DEI initiatives counter to the prevailing culture of the time, as measured by the general approach towards marginalised groups by the sitting US president at the time, benefit more than those who rowed in behind the inhabitant of the White House.

For instance, the pair studied companies that introduced LGBTQ+ initiatives during the administration of President Barack Obama, whose liberal worldview was broadly supportive of LGBTQ+ people. Those businesses actually saw the value of their stock decrease by 0.34 per cent, while businesses that introduced initiatives for veterans – red meat for red Republicans – during the Obama years saw a share price spike of 0.65 per cent.

Things changed as the Obama administration gave way to Donald Trump’s presidency. Companies announcing veterans’ initiatives saw a smaller bump in share price of 0.09 per cent under Trump, while organisations that made a stand about LGBTQ+ rights saw the value of their stocks drop by 0.24 per cent – less than under Obama.

“DEI initiatives are important to companies – they can’t thrive without engaging in socially responsible issues – but I think they just have to be smart about it, as well as any perceptions around any controversial topics, because if they don’t, they will likely face a competitive disadvantage,” says Kim.

Of course, there is one thing not backed by scientific research that we’d argue is worth bearing in mind: being morally right is worth more than any short-term share price bump.

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Chris Stokel-Walker