Trauma-Informed Productivity: Strategies for a More Mindful Workplace
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For any individual or organization looking to be successful, productivity is often the number one priority. Productivity is the ability for individuals, teams, and organizations to take the steps necessary to reach their goals, like completing a project or reaching a desired outcome. Unfortunately, most of us are operating from a limited, ineffective, or even incorrect understanding of productivity, how productivity works, and how to increase it. But, when that misunderstanding is corrected, we can greatly increase productivity for individuals, teams, and organizations through a more mindful workplace.
When leaders and organizations attempt to increase productivity, normal strategies include increasing work hours, increasing discipline, and improving time management. While these tactics can be helpful in certain cases, they have diminishing benefits over time and can often be harmful or even counterproductive. These practices often preference short term results and sacrifice long term success, diminish individual wellbeing, create a negative cultural impact, and lead to burnout. There are other more useful approaches for reaching long term, sustainable productivity based on a scientific, biological understanding of how our bodies and brains work to reach our goals.
The psychological research shows that pushing harder to reach productivity is unhelpful when there are major constraints that are holding us back. These constraints often include biological limitations that exist inside our brains, bodies, and nervous systems to protect us from pain, especially when we have faced pain in the past. To understand this better, we can look towards a trauma-informed model of productivity that will lead to a more mindful, and productive, workplace.
Trauma is a widespread experience that can have a significant impact on our physical, emotional, and cognitive well-being. Trauma is broadly defined as emotional pain that exceeds our brain and body’s ability to process effectively. Trama then becomes stored in our nervous system, reducing our capacity in many ways, including increasing anxiety and decreasing productivity.
Trauma lies on a continuum, which means that it can be severe, moderate, or mild, or anywhere in between, and still affects our brains. What is traumatic for one person may not be traumatic for another.. For many people, the effects of trauma can increase stress and make it difficult to focus, collaborate, and be productive at work. It may surprise you to learn that chronic, toxic stress from overwork or an unhealthy workplace can lead to trauma as well. That means that employees coming from past traumatic work environments may have diminished productivity even as they enter new workplaces.
A trauma-informed workplace is one that recognizes the impact of emotional stress and trauma on employees and takes steps to create a supportive environment to reduce the impact, and ultimately collaborate to heal together for mutual benefit. This means understanding the effects of trauma and stress, providing employees with the resources they need to improve and heal, and creating a culture of trust and respect. Focusing on these factors has been shown to decrease the factors that can constrict productivity within the workplace, and increases employee motivation and goal attainment, greatly benefiting the organization overall, including increased productivity.
We recognize this trauma-informed lens is a paradigm shift for most people, so we have included recommendations for different levels of change, including changes anyone can make for themselves to become more productive, easily accessible changes in the workplace to increase mindful productivity, and more transformative changes leaders and employers can make to enhance productivity over the long term based on a mindful, trauma-informed workplace.
There are simple strategies individuals can focus on to increase their productivity through a mindful, trauma-informed understanding. These practices include:
Rather than trying to increase pressure through working harder, faster, or longer, focus on decreasing stress to improve productivity. This means taking breaks, implementing relaxation techniques, and creating a schedule that doesn’t create nervous system overload. It is also important to focus on strategies that not just manage stress, but decrease it over the long term. Recess’ technology can help individuals to decrease stress in both the immediate moment and long term.
Instead of focusing on individual productivity, make sure your team is able to effectively collaborate to reach goals together when individuals are facing stress, overload, or trauma triggers. This means that individual overwhelm can be addressed within the context of the team, rather than increasing stress, pressure, and potentially creating trauma for any individual employee
When things are going well and stress isn’t actively present, it's the perfect time for individuals to address the backlog of stored up stress and trauma. This enables us to be more prepared for when stress and pressure eventually increase, so that we have greater bandwidth due to increased nervous system health. This may include improving your physical, emotional, and cognitive health, including going to therapy to address past wounds.
To your best ability at work, and certainly outside of work, engage in activities that feel fun, bring joy, and are creative. This includes hobbies, sports, creative endeavors, games, and anything else that increases happiness. These activities help regulate stress in the nervous system and increase productivity.
There are some simple strategies employers and leaders can implement to take steps towards a more mindful, trauma-informed workplace that leads to increased productivity. These practices have been shown to increase productivity for individuals and teams:
Some employees may need to have more flexibility with their work schedules in order to manage their stress. This could mean allowing employees to work from home, adjust their start and end times, or take breaks throughout the day.
Stress and trauma can be exhausting, both physically and mentally. Employers can help employees to stay refreshed and productive by offering opportunities for breaks and relaxation throughout the day. This could include providing comfortable break areas, offering relaxation techniques, or encouraging employees to take short walks or listen to music during breaks.
Offer training to help employees and leaders to increase their ability to communicate, understand each other while under stress, and increase emotional awareness of themselves and their coworkers. Recess can help by offering programs to increase these skills.
Employees who are struggling with stress and trauma may need to focus on self-care in order to manage their symptoms. Employers can encourage self-care by providing information about resources, offering wellness programs and stress management training, and creating a culture where it is okay to take care of oneself. Implementing Recess’ technology in your organization helps individuals to decrease their stress and increase their productivity.
There are a number of strategies that employers and leaders can use to invest over time to create a trauma-informed workplace that increases productivity by decreasing the constraints of stress. It takes more time and investment, but the improvements to productivity are worth the effort. These include:
Providing employees with a physical and emotional space where they feel safe and respected that emphasizes patience and understanding of individual challenges. It also means creating policies and procedures that protect employees from discrimination and harassment. Research shows that those who have been mistreated in the past are more likely to face discrimination in the workplace.
Professional development and educational opportunities that empower employees to manage their own stress and trauma reduces the pressure on employers and creates a balance between a supportive culture and individual responsibility. These professional development opportunities help employees who have experienced trauma and stress to manage their symptoms and be more productive at work. This could include offering training and coaching around Mindfulness, Emotional Intelligence, Stress Management, and Trauma-Informed work practices, establishing employee assistance programs, providing access to therapy and coaching, or creating a peer support network within your organization. Recess provides technology and training like these to help organizations create a Mindful and Trauma-Informed Workplace.
Stress and trauma can be triggered by a variety of events or situations. Employers and Leaders can create practices that normalize and encourage sharing triggers and challenges between leadership and within teams. This empowers everyone including individuals, their leaders, and their teams to help to prevent triggers by being mindful of the environment and by providing employees with information about how to manage triggers.
This means giving employees a voice in decision-making and allowing them to have control over their work environment. It also means providing opportunities for employees to learn about trauma and how it can affect their work.
By implementing these strategies, employers can create a more mindful and trauma-informed workplace that supports productivity and employee well-being. Recess can help employers to implement technology and design programs to create a more mindful, trauma-informed workplace and empower their employees to address the impact of their trauma on their work, increasing their productivity.
Research shows that stress and trauma have a significant impact on our ability to be productive at work. However, by implementing a trauma-informed perspective on productivity and creating a mindful, trauma-informed workplace, employers can support the productivity of employees who experience stress and trauma. This can lead to a more positive and productive work environment for everyone.
Recess helps individuals to decrease stress and improve motivation and productivity through a mindful, trauma informed approach. Recess utilizes our innovative bilateral stimulation combined with our Foundation of Flow Framework to help you achieve these goals. By combining Recess with the tips in this blog post, you can decrease stress and increase productivity.
For leaders and organizations, the most important understanding we can provide is that forcing employees to work harder, faster, or more time will only increase the negative impact of trauma and stress. Instead, with a scientific understanding of the impact of stress and trauma on productivity, we can establish a culture that increases productivity and success sustainably in the long term.
Recess focuses on helping companies to implement technology, training, and culture that recognizes this trauma-informed perspective on productivity and helps individuals, teams, and leaders to shift this dynamic. By implementing Recess within your organization, you will find productivity increases sustainably as does overall wellbeing.
