Mindfulness in the Workplace

Well Being and Self Care for Community and Workplace

All of the programmes delivered out of the Sanctuary contribute to the cultivation of wellbeing and self care.

Sanctuary Way (SWAY)

In Ireland, between the years 2010 and 2015, work related stress doubled.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the increase in stress has wide reaching implications, including a cost of 20 billion euro in the EU alone, due to sick days.

However, work related stress does not only affect employee absenteeism. It has numerous organizational consequences including lost productivity, poor job performance, higher rates of employee turnover, increased accident frequency, and greater healthcare and legal spending (Quick, Quick, Nelson and Hurrell,1997).

One of the main factors influencing work related stress is work place culture.

So, how do we go about changing culture?

How do we answer the call of the WHO to create “a healthy working environment… in which there is not only an absence of harmful conditions but an abundance of health-promoting ones”?

The Sanctuary’s SWAY programme is designed to provide the resources and training for organizations to create healthy working environments- to change culture through contemplative practice.

It has been evidenced that mindfulness, compassion and contemplative practices within organisations has decreased employee stress, emotional exhaustion, and job burnout and increased mood and life satisfaction (Shapiro, Astin, Bishop and Cordova, 2005;Galantino, Baime, Maguire, Szapary and Farrar, 2005; Neff, 2011).

Through face to face training, along with online resources, the SWAY programme incorporates experiential practices based in mindfulness, reflection, self-kindness and communication, arming organisational teams with the tools to flourish within the workplace, while helping to sustain personal wellbeing and mental health.