Corporate Yoga and Its Implications

Abstract

Yoga is being practiced as a complete means of total health and human excellence for time immemorial. So attraction towards Yoga has been highly increased in corporate world, especially in developed countries. Merely US invests $ 5.7 billion dollar per year for yoga classes and products [1]. Large corporations of the world like MICROSOFT, IBM, HBO, The White House, New York Police Dept., PepsiCo, United Airlines, and Nike etc have incorporated yoga to fulfill health criteria of performance excellence. Research at Stress Reduction Clinic at University of Massa-chutes Medical Center has also proclaimed that yoga in conjunction with meditation can indeed lower stress and improve work performance. Distress has been found as a causative factor of nearly 90% of doctor visits and illness among US employees [2]. Hence, researcher was inspired to conduct an experiment entitled distress management of corporate personnel through yogic intervention as a pilot study to get more clues about implications of corporate yoga. The yogic intervention was comprised of selected yogic postures, breathing mechanics (Pranayama), gestures, psychic locks, concentrations, and meditations was given for one month among 50 corporate personnel(25 male and 25 female) from Indian Telephone Industry, Raebrali, India. It was randomized control trial with 50 participants and 50 controls containing same number of males and females with age range 25-55(51±5.1)) years. The result met showed significant effect of the yogic intervention to manage distress and enhance work performance at p<0.01. This study favored the efficacy of corporate yoga to boost health, harmony, morale, work motivation, commitment, performance and productivity at individual and organizational levels. Consequently, researcher thought of developing corporate yoga capsules and their scientific validation simultaneously at large.