Restorative Mindfulness in the Workplace
Episode 14 of our green and healthy places podcast focused on wellness and sustainability in real estate and hospitality: Leigh Chapman, Founder of Yinshi, a workplace wellness start-up focused on facilitating meditation at work.
The ‘Green & Healthy Places’ podcast explores sustainability, wellbeing and community in real estate and hospitality.
This episode is with Yinshi, a company promoting restorative mindfulness in the workplace.
The Role of Restorative Meditation in Workplace Wellness
Today I’m with Leigh Chapman, Founder of Yinshi, a workplace wellness start-up focused on facilitating meditation at work.
His business model is both hardware and software, providing physical meditation pods that can provide a safe haven for an office worker to escape to for a little quiet time, as well as a suite of services to facilitate and encourage a greater acceptance and understanding of the value meditation can bring to the workday.
We discuss the pros and cons of open-plan offices on mental health, the benefits of biophilic design, micro-napping at work, the ‘Six Whys of Meditation’, how mindfulness improves productivity and the human-centric office post-Covid.
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A full transcript follows courtesy of Otter.ai - apologies for any typos lost in translation!
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Welcome to Episode 14 of the green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of wellness and sustainability in real estate and hospitality. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of BioBlu sustainability, Biofilico wellness interiors, and Biofit nature gyms.
Today, I'm with Leigh Chapman, founder of Yinshe, a workplace wellness startup focused on facilitating meditation. at work. His business model is both hardware and software, providing physical meditation pods that offer a safe haven for an office worker to escape for a little quiet time, as well as a suite of services to facilitate and encourage greater acceptance and understanding of the value meditation can bring.
To the work day, we discussed the pros and cons of open plan offices or mental health, the benefits of biophilic design, one of my favourite topics, micro napping at work, what he calls the six Whys of meditation, and how mindfulness is linked to productivity, and his views on the human centric office post COVID. It's an interesting conversation.
He's a super bright guy, with big plans to make an impact on the workplace in London. If you like this type of content, please consider subscribing…..
So, Leigh thanks for joining us. I'm excited to talk to you today. I'm really keen to hear more about your your new business inchie. So perhaps you could give a quick intro to what you're doing and the products that you currently have on the market.
Leigh Chapman 2:05
Hi, Matt. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for thanks very much for having me. Today, really excited to talk to you. So yeah, just give you a quick, quick overview. He and she is a product service solution, all sorts of different things, which is primarily born out of the need to combat the issues that we've got stress and mental health in society in general today, which cost the UK economy up to 45 billion a year.
And obviously, that's a societal wide problem, but we look specifically workspaces and how we can improve and help contribute to better workspaces. And part of that is about the appropriate spaces or having the appropriate spaces for physical, mental health.
And in particular, we are really passionate advocates, advocates of meditation. And that comes from, from my backstory, I won't go into it too deeply. But I found meditation at a time when I was suffering from stress quite badly at work, difficult points in my life. And helped so profoundly, I can't begin to tell you hopefully, we'll get into that a little bit later.
But the problem that I had was that I couldn't find space to do it every day. And in actual fact, at the time, I was doing a type of meditation, which required you to practice twice a day.
So if you couldn't find a space to do it in the morning, then, you know, there was even harder to find a space later in the day, because offices just for most offices just aren't cut out or designed to have that type of space for mental wellness.
And I had the typical problem where I would find myself in the toilets, once a day, trying to find some kind of peace and someone in the cubicle next to me trying their best to not let me find some peace. And one day I just had a bit of a spark a light bulb, and just thought this gotta be a better way of doing this, really. So that's where the idea was born.
And we our main products are meditation pods that provide a quiet, peaceful, private, secure space for people to meditate in their own time. And we suppose we're kind of retrofitting these spaces into offices, because it would be great if they were designed in that way in the first place. And those kind of aspects of well being well thought about and integrated into the design process, they obviously starting to be which is great.
And some offices do have areas for for meditation, but not many. And actually, those areas that they do have sometimes aren't ideal because a lot of people have a self a sense of self consciousness that they can't get over and end up don't using those spaces at all. So our spaces are a little bit more private than that.
So yeah, we're kind of retrofit retrofit in these spaces in So offices really and and trying to make a meaningful contribution to people's mental health and stress levels while they're at work.
Matt Morley 5:08
Okay, so a couple of things you mentioned that I thought were worth picking up on. Clearly, the subtext to that is that the shift towards more open plan offices, one of the side effects of that has been there is effectively a limit to the number of spaces or options available to someone where they can have a private moment where they can
Yeah, just just pull away from, from the hub. And I think that's the challenge for that has become the challenge more recently around workplace wellness, and particularly around design and layout for a lot of sort of the big corporates is, is how you balance that that sort of free flowing movement, hot hot desks and what have you, but also creating enough areas of privacy. So clearly, in a way you're responding to that because there are fewer people in their own private offices now than there were, say 20 years ago, right. So in a sense, it's a response to that or a solution to that problem.
Leigh Chapman 6:09
Yeah, definitely. I think there's, there's a lot been said about open plan offices isn't the real Marmite kind of area, some people love them. Some people, some people hate them. And you're right, there's so much good about them, you know, I can talk about things like collaboration, creativity, ideas that are sparked through random encounters, that kind of stuff.
But you know, there is the flip side as well, and that they aren't good for everyone's mental health, I don't think they don't suit every type of personality. I don't know, if you listen to Bruce daisley at all. He's SVP of Twitter, in the UK, and he does a lot of stuff around working environments. And that's the company's kind of thing. Now, he's really interesting.
He came out with quite an amusing comment on one of his podcasts recently, which was open plan offices are the best way to get everyone in the company to absolutely hate each other very quickly. Because there's so many things that really wind people up about those spaces. You could be sitting next to someone and you know, you don't get any work done for an hour, because all they want to talk about is you know, what happened in, you know, the Queen's gambit last last night or something like that.
So they don't say absolutely everyone, I think there is an acknowledgment of that. Now, I think people are starting to question that. It can be really interesting to see how the workplace evolves, I think when we go back, post COVID, and all the challenges that that's obviously going to throw up. And it'll be really interesting to see how people start to re examine those a lot more when they're thinking about office design, and what's really sort of best for our productivity and mental health at the same time.
Matt Morley 7:46
So even before COVID, this was a year and a half, two years ago, I was involved in a sort of biophilic design consultancy project for a big corporate in Switzerland, just outside of Zurich. In fact, they do natural foods, and they're all in there were completely into this whole space, but they had a big big issue with the headquarter building around acoustics.
And it was it got right to the top of the tree and that the the global HR director was was really pushing hard to try and address the problems around acoustics, sound levels, background noise. And it got to the point where by you know, we needed to take sort of quite drastic measures we created with sort of acoustic panels all over the place, acoustic paints, acoustic underlays, for the carpets, all kinds of things.
And then in fact, we ended up with a what we call the wellness room, which was effectively a mini space dedicated to, to just kind of chilling out in a sense. So clearly, that's something that's that we're seeing emerging on the market.
But to describe your your pods a bit more in detail, then like, this is a space that you sort of you literally walk into and in a way cut yourself off, right, and you have that quiet moment in a dedicated space by yourself. Whereas a wellness room, you know, might be other people in there in silence or not. But then in one of your pods, it really is a sort of personal moment, right?
Leigh Chapman 9:11
Yeah, exactly. And you know, we're not saying by any means that wellness rooms are not a good idea. And they of course, are totally open for, you know, people to use those and harness them in the way that works for their mental health in the best way.
But you know, a lot of people it doesn't work. And like I said before, there's just too much of a sense of self security for them to go in there and really, properly relax and switch off. So. So our environments on our pods are designed to be a little bit more private.
They're hard to describe verbally, I'd say to anyone, probably best to go to our website. If you just Google the inchie you'll find that quite easily and you'll be able to see them. There's two two parts that we've designed The word pod one is a kind of an open circular spiral design. It's made with birch plywood, which we chose for it's kind of calming natural materials and colours, as well as it kind of feeling quite restorative as well.
And it's a biomimetic design, which is inspired by the golden ratio, which I'm sure you've heard of before, which is a really common sort of spiral pattern found throughout nature, from galaxies down to plants, and the way they kind of pattern out spiral. And enter in the pod is really a bit of a journey, I suppose we were trying to create its likes of what we wanted to do was it really feel like you were stepping out of your current environment into a different one, one that was more instantly more relaxing, and you could straightaway just feel a little bit more ease and breathe more easily.
And we supply noise cancelling headphones as well, really comfortable noise reducing headphones that come with guided meditations, as well as sleep enhancing audio, because we believe in micro napping, as well as lots of studies that, that back that up is a really useful tool as well.
Matt Morley 11:07
Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. Because it's, it's, I've seen some interesting stuff coming out around lactation pods or lactation rooms. For young mums who bring their kids to school at camp, their kids don't go to school, so they bring their kid into the with a baby into the office. And then obviously, in parallel with that yet sleeping pods or giving staff within the Office permission to have let's say, a power nap during the day. And then so in a sense, I can see how the your pods would would really fit into that.
So a lot of it then clearly is about having or sensing that there is permission to do this. Right? And so how do you how do you pitch the and obviously around sleep and the sort of the 20 to 30 minute power nap there's there's lots of research around that when you when you talk about meditation in terms of its benefits for restoring concentration levels?
Or what are the the touch points that you tend to fall back on when you're when you're talking about specifically meditation as opposed to going outside for a walk or having a coffee or, or whatever else someone might do to try and relax at some point, say mid afternoon when they have that energy dip.
Leigh Chapman 12:22
Hmm, yeah, good question. It's a bit hard to know where to start the story on this one sometimes, because you can come in at very different points in different angles. But I think everyone has probably heard this sort of anecdote about the amygdala, right, the part of our brain, which is the reptilian brain, which Yeah, kind of responsible for our fight or flight responses. And works by activating cortisol in our system for when we do need that fight or flight response.
And it was kind of designed for us to you know, fend off woolly mammoths, rather than actually deal with having 152 on opened emails in our inbox. And that's kind of what it's doing at the moment, right to us. We're working ridiculously crazy hours, a lot of us under high pressure, stressful jobs. And cortisol is just bad for us in so many different ways. You know, it's been shown to increase anxiety, depression, have physiological issues, digestive problems, headaches, heart disease, sleep problems, lots and lots of different health issues that that's attributed to.
But the good news story in all this is that we can change all that, you know, in terms of how we actually change the neuro plasticity of our brains, to rewire them to react differently to external pressures that we face on a day to day basis.
And meditation is one of the ways that you can do that. And we talk about when I actually go into companies and try and launch the part and embed meditation as a practice, we talk about the six Whys of meditation. And they are reduces stress, improves attention and creativity, the fact that it's foundational wellbeing practice, the fact that successful people are doing it, which I'll come on to a bit more in a second. The factor is great for relationships.
And also the last one, which is a little bit tongue in cheek, but you look younger, which I'll come on to, in a bit with detail in a second. The reduce stress one is kind of linked to what I just said about quarters up.
And there's there's all sorts of studies that have been shown that just one week of 20 minutes a day of meditation leads to a significantly slower response in our amygdala during meditation, which is kind of interesting in its own right, but actually, when you look up studies that went a bit further, they showed that eight weeks lead to the same effect during a baseline states and not just when you are during meditation, but slower amygdala response rate when you actually just ignore Your day to day level of consciousness.
And the second one I mentioned was about improved creativity and attention. And there's studies on that as well that show free 10 minute sessions of breath counting was enough to appreciably increase attention skills in a control group.
And then other studies around open monitoring meditation, which is kind of like body scan meditation. And that was shown to stimulate divergent thinking, which is a really key driver of creativity, which is the type of income using brainstorms and coming up to Business Solutions. The third was a foundational wellbeing practice.
So meditation didn't just help with, you know, being good in meditation in itself. And the other aspects I've mentioned already, it helps with all aspects of life, you know, you look at the different spheres of wellness, you know, it's not just kind of spiritual, emotional, psychological, but you've got physical, environmental, financial, occupational, social.
And this is one of the biggest things for me about meditation. Because it has a positive feedback, loop effects and all these different areas, you know, once you start meditating, you tend to have better decision making and better intuition. And that creates a bit of a domino effect across these different areas.
So when you're making better decisions, you start to eat more healthfully. When you're eating more healthfully, you do more exercise, you do more exercise, you sleep better, and so on, and so on. And all these areas tend to have like a compound feedback effect, which, which just gets better and better in all the different areas.
And I think this is really critical for businesses, because one of those areas is relationships. And what meditation tends to do is, just puts that slight barrier between the thought and the action sometimes so rather than getting blown around, you know, in the in the winds of your emotions and thoughts, it just gives you that extra seconds sometimes to be aware that actually, this is an emotion that I can be detached from, I can observe it, I can decide how to react to this.
And I've only wish I discovered this early on in my life and avoided some of the compensations that I've unnecessarily had at work, I think. So I think just about building better relationships and a more harmonious kind of work environment, I think it's really, really helpful.
Matt Morley 17:21
I think there's a lot in that I really do. And I've come to think of my modest meditation practice of, you know, 20 minutes a day, as really the the other side of the coin of, of an ongoing, yeah, essentially sort of therapy.
The two really do go together working on understanding your own triggers, and your own the baggage that we're all carrying around with us. I think in a way, you know, there's just so much being put out there right now around the benefits of mindfulness, the benefits of meditation, that I think there's a good, good chance you sort of ride that wave.
You mentioned Silicon Valley, and a lot of those big tech companies are are the innovators, you know, that the first on board, when it comes to biophilic design are the first on board when it comes to workplace wellness, and they're really leading the way. So no doubt, you know, it will be, it will be a very interesting pitch to be in on when you when you get in front of someone Amazon or Facebook, for example, forget your pods in there, but thinking sort of slightly more of a wider market, you know, into sort of London's corporate world of legal offices and insurers and so on, or even banking offices.
How would you How would you imagine if there were, say, a well being champion within that business, who was able to at least get you, you know, introduction in there. And then obviously, the questions start coming up around what, you know, how do we, how do we know?
How do we monitor its use? Or how do we know beyond someone sitting there all day watching to see how many people are going in or coming out? How long people spend? How could you collect some kind of data to corroborate or at least show that it's being out well adopted by by the staff on that particular floor? Or within that building?
Leigh Chapman 19:08
Yeah, it's a really crucial point, Matt, and something that I've thought about a lot from the start of this and how we bake that into into the offerings. I don't think enough companies are tracking this in terms of the wellness space.
And the industry does sort of get let down by that, I think, and some people do have a slightly sceptical view of some of the wellness offerings as a result and I think really important for internal stakeholders, obviously to have that justification and take people on the on the journey with them and have that story and, you know, data to sort of back up that yes, this is working is providing us some some return on investment and some value.
You know, when we instal the pod, we make sure it's got a booking calendar set up with it so we can tell occupancy rates and who's using it. So repeat usage. You know, we need to kind of market it or make the awareness of it more known to who who aren't using it currently. And then, you know, obviously, qualitative measures, like employee feedback are really useful as well, you know, the anecdotal measurements such as, you know, people's performance, who are using it, like self assessment in terms of their well being.
And then also, you know, we do offer to sort of help advise on more, especially larger scale testing to assess the effectiveness of it as well, which isn't always possible for some companies. But there's some amazing studies out there at the moment, you know, there was a famous one in the US by insurance company, Aiden, who showed that the introduction of a mindfulness programme led to an extra $3,000 a year in productive productivity from their, from their teams, you know, so that so there are also large scale testing programmes that you can put in place to measure that. And also be really looking at stuff like healthcare costs, you know, the reduced amount of claims that they see as a result of that this is a preventative medicine, really.
nd then you'd have reduced rates of absenteeism, presenteeism things like staff turnover. Yeah, there's all kinds of sorts of things that you can measure, it really depends how how deep they want to go. Really?
Matt Morley 21:20
Yeah, that makes sense. And to be fair, I'm putting you on the spot there. But the reality is from the, from the owner or developer, or from the corporate side, you know, clearly there is no one answer to these problems. It's a it's a case of creating a nurturing environment that fosters productivity and creativity and positive relationships.
And there is no magic bullet for that. It's about putting a number of strategies in place of which I'm fully convinced that meditation kind of should have a seat at the table, for sure. I'm just wondering, you know, clearly, we're discussing this within the context of a global pandemic, that looks like it's going to have an impact, the lasting impact on the return to work, but not just that, in terms of also, you know, how we how we use offices in future, I'm wondering how you've had to adapt your business strategy over the last year, or how you add a date how you see things over the next year, because it could well be that you get a sort of slingshot effect off the back of all of this right with an increased interest on behalf of on behalf of businesses in, in creating innovative, interesting and engaging workspaces, right, where meditation can be a part of that.
Leigh Chapman 22:36
Yeah, absolutely. And he gets it. Yeah, it's an incredibly interesting time, like you say, you know, I think there's a short term, medium term change, and then a long term change as well. I've read a blog post recently, actually, around this exact topic, actually called human centric offices.
You know, it looks undoubtable, that we're going to be going back to a sort of more hybrid approach. You know, I think the the stats have been coming out overwhelmingly in favour of that, I think there was a yougov survey recently, which showed I think, four in 10. People, you know, want to don't want to sort of carry on in the same way as it was before.
So there's some, there's some really compelling reasons for, for going back to the office, but also some compelling reasons for how we can sort of carry on all the goodness that we've got from this remote work and experience.
Because I think, you know, this, it works for more experienced sort of staff, you know, with this remote working, but we've got to remember that there's, there's a whole swathe of of people coming into work at the moment who are missing out on that sort of face to face collaboration, the relationships, you know, we spoke about, you know, being able to solve complex problems, the ease of conversation, you know, not dropping out halfway through because of bad Wi Fi, all that kind of stuff. So there's lots of good reasons for getting people back to the office.
But I think we need to kind of convince people a little bit, and certainly people who are kind of resistant to that at the moment. So I think there's a short to medium term job to do that. And part of that is making sure mental health is put as a key priority. Obviously, there's all sorts of kind of measures that we can put in place to that.
And I think there was a study done by the Prince's Trust youth index recently that showed it one in four people have been unable to cope during the pandemic. And there's obviously huge mental health issues that are going to have to be addressed.
So mental health really needs to be at the top of the agenda and enticing people back making them feel comfortable about coming back to work or the safety measures that that obviously have to be put in place as part of that are also critical. I think, looking at sort of more medium to long term. Really this idea about and it's something we've been seeing, obviously already, but I think it's only going to accelerate this idea about the office being a destination And somewhere we really kind of want to actually go into and we see some value in it and we see some some positive kind of mental health benefits from it at the same time, this idea about kind of premium eyes in the office. Similarly, I think the to sort of go hand in hand, and all the all the subjects that obviously, you know, close to your heart, like biophilic design are going to be really crucial here.
But you know, other stuff like, you know, almost like ideas, like making the office like more of a Art Gallery, you know, making it interactive, making it more experiential, making it very shareable. You know, I think there's going to be huge talent flight to companies that really get that right. And clearly, you know, we're not going to need quite as much space as we did before, in the medium to long term because of this new balance between working in the office and working at home.
So I think there's a real opportunity, and I think people are starting to really sort of cottoned on to that. And hopefully, yeah, we can, we can be part of the solution for for people that want to be involved in that as well.
Matt Morley 26:03
Another trend that you're you're nicely positioned to, to fit in with, I think is around the shift to environmental, social and governance or ESG, oriented policies at the real estate developer and an owner, landlord level.
There's, there's details in there now with the latest ESG guidelines, particularly around mental health, and the idea of there being a mental health officer, someone who's done a modest piece of training around understanding how to help someone who, if there isn't a full HR department available, at least there's someone there who's kind of the dedicated go to person that you can, you can talk to you and I think, you know, these systems, I know I've mentioned it to you offline previously around the kind of green building and healthy buildings certification systems, for sure, are a way to sense kind of encourage the industry to move in the right direction.
So that then leads me on to the idea of the green buildings and sort of the materials and you mentioned briefly how you're you're producing or the materials that you're using for the pots in terms of like the manufacturing process itself. Talk to us just briefly about how you've, you've gone about that because you're effectively it is a product you manufacturing in the UK, are you manufacturing abroad and importing like what's what's your current setup in that in that sense?
Leigh Chapman 27:34
Yeah, we UK manufacturing at the moment, it was it was tempting to go down the road of Far East or Eastern Europe, because obviously the the value is extraordinary. But we really wanted to keep our carbon footprint to a minimum. So we decided to take a bit of a hit on that and produce in UK and keep it as local as possible. In terms of the materials that we use, the main material in the pod number one is birch ply.
We chose that because it's a really fast growing species of trees, so it's relatively easy to replace. The wood wastage of plywood, during the manufacturing process is also significantly less when compared with traditional lumber practices.
And it also tends to be much more durable as well. So it tends to last longer. We use walling off or near in pod number two. And obviously that has also got some good eco sustainability creds. In fact, that veneer is a very low wastage, you know, option for for word. So yeah, there are there
Leigh Chapman 28:39
are main kind of ways that we're trying to help sustainability in terms of the materials that we that we use, but we also, you know, donate to the world land trust as well for every pot that sold. And I think generally just maybe, slightly less tangibly, but I really do passionately believe that.
Meditation helps to raise people's consciousness generally, you know, it puts more community on things like so puts more emphasis on things like community, and looking out for each other, and the world.
And I think that has to be good for sustainability as a whole, you know, you're talking about sort of creating a greener and happier planet, I think we need to create a greener and happier mind, if that can be such a thing.
And really, we're passionate about exposing more people to how meditation can can really help open their mind and be more aware of sustainability and, and the decisions that we make and how they impact everything else.
Matt Morley 29:43
Yeah, it's it's definitely, you know, very closely aligned with that the idea of the people on planet and community as you mentioned, I think that's increasingly becoming a bit more than just a buzzword.
A lot of the green building certifications are shifting in that direction now and in response to events over the last 12 months just to sort of wrap things up if you could send if there was one message if there's one piece of content that you want to get out to the corporate workplace community or to people are considering how to adapt or adjust their, their workplace environment going back in after, yeah, a year or perhaps more of working from home like what what's the what's the one thought that really is driving everything you're doing that you'd sort of put up on a billboard.
Unknown Speaker 30:32
But I mentioned an article that I recently wrote, it's on our website called human centric design, I'd urge people to go there and have a read, this is a very practical guide or my take on on what the guide is for managing that transition for us back into the workspace.
But I think if something on a billboard would maybe say, just really urge people to consider in making space for meditation in their business as the benefits are transformative. You know, your, your teams could be so much happier, more productive, resilient, creative, collaborative, cooperative, and just all around nicer to each other. And that stuff is viral, you know, it spreads and it creates economic as well as societal and psychological benefits. Okay, best of luck, man.