We live in a world of hacks. If it’s not a productivity hack, it’s a home hack or an organization hack. Thus, I wasn’t surprised when I stumbled across a 6-week brain hack. At first glance, it said the same thing every sane person has been saying for a while – mindfulness works and exercise is the way to go. However, we are in the last quarter of the year and I have not made much progress by the way of exercise nor meditation. My mind has an annoying habit of being unable to focus on one thing for longer than three minutes. I’m hardly four sentences into this post and I’ve already picked up my phone five times. So, let’s do this. For the next four weeks, until the 31st of this month, I am going to do what the author of the BBC article did; I am going to meditate for 30 minutes a day in two intervals of 15 minutes each and I am going to run regularly with the aim of being able to run 6kms by the end of this month. And no, I am not going to get MRI scans as appealing as it may sound.
Meditating is one challenge. For someone who has not run for over a month and struggled to run more than 2kms yesterday, that’s going to be a completely different challenge but if it helps me regulate stress, deal with disappointing and negative emotions, I am going to give it my best shot.
But because so much of my life has and continues to revolve around the field of human resources, I immediately wondered why work had not invested as much effort into this brain hack. After all, we’ve been trying to help our employees deal with stress for a while now (let’s park the fact that the workplace is often the primary reason for stress in the first place). Then I realized that workplaces do invest in exactly the ways listed in the study. They do the one thing easiest to do. Even if the most effective way to reduce stress in an employee’s life would be to make work sustainable and enjoyable, the solution offered instead is a subscription to a mindfulness app and something related to physical health.
I thought about why neither attempts had worked for me and here’s the simple answer – I do not want my organization to prescribe which mindfulness platform or application I should use, nor do I want them to be prescriptive about my fitness regime. I want them to be supportive without interference. I use Headspace and free subscriptions to Calm or other apps are as good as useless to me. Let me choose what works for me and maybe reimburse that instead. Same for my fitness regime. Let me determine if I want to invest in going to a gym or better running shoes for a run in the park. Yes, corporate deals may work out cheaper for the organization but like everything, autonomy helps.
If you are an HR professional who can influence the wellness benefits your organization provides, I challenge you to give your employees the power of autonomy and if you are not, I challenge you to hack your brain for four weeks with me. Even better – if you can book yourself in for a scan and push the sample size of one up by another, this is your nudge to do it!
And if you choose to do neither, let me know in the comments below how you are making the most of the last quarter of 2023?
The HR Business Partner Story 