The term “co-creator” (at the end of the article) jumped out to me as an ideal way to treat all employees of a company. If everyone’s ideas about company processes are valued and integrated, that creates an atmosphere of respect and allows everyone to invest in the success of the processes. Sounds like a great work environment.
I have huge issues with trying to combine them with for-profit strive-and-drive hit-the-goals success culture. To me, that's a contradictory and frankly crazy-making combination.
The last time I saw something similar was when Lululemon tried to make yoga-culture and positivity obligatory. That was not so successful at making employees treat each other well:
I don't doubt Asana is a cool place to work. But I don't think it's necessary to use jargon from other cultures and spiritual traditions to make people happy and get stuff done.
I find the approach culty and creepy, and unless rewards are being distributed with the workload, I also question whether it's fully informed at best - or entirely sincere, at worst.
Not sure how mindfulness and “strive-and-drive” are incompatible/contradictory. Isn't one of the goals of mindfulness to take time to ensure everything is working as efficiently as possible? And I feel rewarded when I impact work processes, when I’m able to share my ideas and see them discussed and implemented. Monetary reward is not the only motivator or measure of fulfillment for people. (And I don't even work at Asana)
Also the lululemon piece seemed to be about the company creating a marketing campaign with whatever made-up version of yoga most improved sales, which seems far from the internal practices that are discussed in this article.
Right. I'm automatically sceptical of these practices when it comes from an employer/company. Maybe that's just due to the fundamental power dynamic (which I suspect the concept of co-creators won't mitigate, but I guess anything is possible).
On the other hand, maybe workplaces can't help but promote certain culturally motivated practices, whether they can help it or not? A company that endorses crunch time and regular over time, has already tacitly endorsed a certain philosophy and culture when it comes to how people should be managed and how productivity is leveraged.
For those interested in mindfulness, I recommend the book Search Inside Yourself. It's based on the course at Google by the same name, as mentioned in the article. It's an easy read and I found it actionable in everyday life.
Really great read. Agree with almost everything written. The only part I'd find hard to implement would be the pre-meeting meditation...
I've tried once to have a colleague, a certified Yoga instructor, to have short Yoga sessions in the morning with everyone, but it quickly became a joke, not a real thing.
That specific point was about Google. At Asana, we offer 1:1 and group Yoga sessions, and some people get together to meditate. A lot of people take it quite seriously, but it's in no way pushed on anyone.
All the techniques in this article could have been discussed just as effectively without introducing an ambiguous and frankly suspicious term such as "mindfulness". Being open and honest about conflicts, facing uncomfortable facts, and allowing people to have a say in things could all be described simply as "good business" or "common sense". Relying on a buzzword such as "mindfulness" betrays a religious agenda.
How is "mindfulness" a religious term? When you're "mindful" of something, you're conscious or aware of it. It's in the dictionary. Seems like the perfect word for describing a process of greater awareness...and if that word also happens to be used in Buddhism and Yoga to mean the same thing, well, that's hardly a coincidence, is it?
It's not as if they're talking about practicing Ganesh worship.
The word as used in the dictionary isn't religious, but 99% of the people are using with connotations of a sort of religious-mystical-woo.
(I refer just to the noun-form "mindfullness" and not all forms of the word, e.g. "to be mindful of [some specific thing]".)
Reading the article made "Asana" sound less like a business and more like a slightly creepy cult. Which, hey, if that helps them make money then more power to them, but they should be very careful that this kind of thing (meditating before meetings?) doesn't start turning into discriminatory hiring practices.
99% might have connotations like that to it, but that doesn't prevent large healthcare groups etc. from using it. E.g. Kaiser Permanente offers courses in "Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction", and so there is plenty of non-religious training material available for mindfulness meditation.
Even some of the best introductory resources on mindfulness meditation from Buddhist sources are refreshingly free of "religious-mystical-woo", or careful to separate the woo from the practice. E.g. my of my two favourite introductory resources, one (Gil Fronsdal's podcasts "Introduction to Meditation") specifically jokes about "the 'B'-word" and mentions buddhism just barely for context, and the book Mindfulness in Plain English mentions Buddhist traditions only for historical context.
As an uncompromising atheist and skeptic, this is the reason I ended up with mindfulness meditation over alternatives.
The concept of a/theism might be orthogonal or irrelevant, depending on the viewpoint, to Buddhism.
By the way "uncompromising atheist and sceptic" sounds like a contradiction, at least in the sense of scepticism as the discipline of always questioning things (in general, not specifically when it comes to things like Buddhism, which I won't give an opinion about whether it is worth to investigate or not). But I guess it isn't really a contradiction if it is scepticism as in close mindedness. But it's good that you've found some material that caters to your specific sensibilities and cultural background.
It is a religious term because of the context in which it appears. For instance, the term "Mindfulness" appears along with "Equanimity" and even the conspicuous company name "Asana". When you hear those three terms together, I'd say it's rather unlikely that there's not some kind of religious backdrop to the discussion.
This probably explains why Asana has such a complex and convoluted (read: horrible) user experience. It sounds like it breeds a culture that is too afraid to upset other people, so bad ideas never get shot down.
I can't believe that a company that dog foods its own product to develop the product isn't easier to use. I know everyone has different styles of working and organizing data, but for me, Asana is so bad...
