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014 Yinshi meditation at work
75 Plays5 years ago
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Transcript
Introduction to Wellness in Real Estate
00:00:12
Speaker
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 BioBlue Sustainability, biofilico wellness interiors, and biofit nature gyms.
Lee Chapman on Meditation Business
00:00:31
Speaker
Today I'm with Lee Chapman, founder of Yinxi, 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 workday.
Impact of Office Design on Wellness
00:01:00
Speaker
We discuss the pros and cons of open plan offices or mental health, the benefits of biophilic design, one of my favourite topics, micro napping but work, what he calls the six whys of meditation, and how mindfulness
00:01:15
Speaker
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. And you can of course find Lee at Yinshi. That's Y-I-N-S-H-I.co.uk. And I'm at matmorley.net. So not a must. Here's my conversation with company founder, Lee Chapman.
00:01:50
Speaker
Lee, thanks for joining us. I'm excited to talk to you today. I'm really keen to hear more about your new business, Yinxi. So perhaps you could give a quick intro to what you're doing and the products that you currently have on the market.
Meditation Pods for Stress Relief
00:02:05
Speaker
Hi, Matt. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks very much for having me today. Really excited to talk to you. So, yeah, just give you a quick, quick overview. Yinshi 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 with stress and mental health in society in general today, which
00:02:33
Speaker
It costs the UK economy up to $45 billion a year. And obviously that's a societal-wide problem, but we look specifically at workspaces and how we can improve and help contribute to better workspaces.
00:02:48
Speaker
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 of meditation.
00:03:04
Speaker
And that comes 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 it helped so profoundly. I can't begin to sort of 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. An actual fact at the time, I was doing a type of meditation which required you to practice twice a day.
00:03:34
Speaker
So if you couldn't find a space to do it in the morning then it was even harder to find a space later in the day because most offices just aren't cut out or designed to have that type of space for mental wellness.
00:03:48
Speaker
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 there's got to be a better way of doing this really.
Retrofitting Offices for Mental Wellness
00:04:07
Speaker
So that's where the idea was born. And our main products are meditation pods that provide a quiet.
00:04:15
Speaker
peaceful, private, secure space for people to meditate in their own time. And I suppose we're kind of retrofitting these spaces into offices because it would be great, wouldn't it, if they were designed in that way in the first place. And those kind of aspects of wellbeing were well thought about and integrated into the design process. They are obviously starting to be, which is great. And some offices do have areas for meditation, but not many.
00:04:40
Speaker
And actually those areas that they do have sometimes aren't ideal because a lot of people have a sense of self-consciousness that they can't get over and end up don't use in those spaces at all. So our spaces are a little bit more private than that. So yeah, we're kind of retrofitting these spaces into offices really and trying to make a meaningful contribution to people's mental health and stress levels while they're at work.
Challenges of Open Plan Offices
00:05:08
Speaker
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
00:05:20
Speaker
One of the side effects of that has been that 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 just pull away from the hubbub. And I think that has become the challenge more recently around workplace wellness and particularly around design and layout for a lot of the big corporates.
00:05:45
Speaker
is how you balance that sort of free flowing movement, 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.
00:06:09
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And I think there's a lot been said about open plan offices, isn't there? It's a real Marmite kind of area. Some people love them, some people hate them. And you're right, there's so much good about them. You talk about things like collaboration, creativity, ideas that are sparked through random encounters, that kind of stuff. But there is the flip side as well in that they aren't good for everyone's mental health. I don't think they suit every type of personality. I don't know if you
00:06:37
Speaker
listened to Bruce Dazley at all. He's an ex-VP of Twitter in the UK and he's got a lot of stuff around working environments and that's become his kind of thing now. He's really interesting. He came out with quite an amusing comment on one of his podcasts recently which was that open plan offices are the best way to get everyone in the company to absolutely hate each other very quickly.
00:07:00
Speaker
because there's so many things that really wind people up about those spaces. You could be sitting next to someone and you don't get any work time for an hour because all they want to talk about is what happened in the Queen's Gambit last night or something like that. So they don't suit absolutely everyone I think.
00:07:22
Speaker
There is an acknowledgement of that now. I think people are starting to question that. It's going to 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.
Biophilic Design in Practice
00:07:35
Speaker
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 best for our productivity and mental health at the same time. So even before COVID, this was a year and a half, two years ago, I was involved in a
00:07:52
Speaker
A biophilic design consultancy project for a big corporate in Switzerland, just outside Zurich. In fact, they do natural foods and they were completely into this whole space, but they had a big, big issue with their headquarter building around acoustics.
00:08:08
Speaker
And it got right to the top of the tree in that the global HR director was really pushing hard to try and address the problems around acoustic sound levels, background noise. And it had got to the point whereby we needed to take quite drastic measures. We created acoustic panels all over the place, acoustic paints, acoustic underlays for the carpets, all kinds of things. And in fact, we ended up with
00:08:35
Speaker
what we call the wellness room, which was effectively a mini space dedicated to just kind of chilling out in a sense. So clearly that's something that we're seeing emerging on the market. But to describe your pods a bit more in detail then,
00:08:51
Speaker
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
00:09:11
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
Features of Meditation Pods
00:09:12
Speaker
And we're not saying by any means that wellness rooms are not a good idea. They, of course, are totally open for people to use those and harness them in the way that works for their mental health in the best way. But a lot of people, it doesn't work. Like I said before, there's just too much of a sense of self-security for them to go in there and really
00:09:39
Speaker
properly relax and switch off. So our environments and our pods are designed to be a little bit more private. They're a little hard to describe verbally, I'd say, to anyone. Probably best to go to our website. If you just Google Yinshi, you'll find that quite easily and you'll be able to see them. There's two pods that we've designed.
00:09:59
Speaker
The work pod one is a kind of a open circular spiral design. It's made with birch plywood, which we chose for its kind of calming natural materials and colors, 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 calming sort of spiral pattern found throughout nature from galaxies down to
00:10:28
Speaker
plants and the way they kind of pattern out spiral. And entering the pod is really a bit of a journey I suppose we were trying to create. It's like what we wanted to do was to 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 straight away just feel a little bit more reason and breathe more easily. And we supply noise cancelling headphones as well, really comfortable noise reducing.
00:10:56
Speaker
headphones that come with guided meditations as well as sleep enhancing audio because we believe in micro napping as well. There's lots of studies that back that up as a really useful tool as well. I was going to ask about that because I've seen some interesting stuff coming out around lactation pods or lactation rooms.
00:11:16
Speaker
for young mums who bring their kids to school, who come, their kids don't go to school, so they bring their kid into the, or their baby into the office. And then obviously, you know, in parallel with that, yeah, sleeping pods, or giving
00:11:31
Speaker
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 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
00:11:59
Speaker
meditation in terms of its benefits for restoring concentration levels or what are the touch points that you tend to fall back on when you're talking about specifically meditation as opposed to going outside for a walk or having a coffee or
00:12:16
Speaker
or whatever else someone might do to try and relax at some point, say mid-afternoon when they have that energy dip. Yeah, good question.
Benefits of Meditation
00:12:24
Speaker
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 and different angles, but I think everyone has probably heard the sort of anecdote about the amygdala, right? The part of our brain, which is the reptilian brain, which yeah, kind of is responsible for our fight-or-flight responses.
00:12:45
Speaker
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 unopened emails in our inbox.
00:13:03
Speaker
And that's kind of what it's doing at the moment to us. And 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. It's been shown to increase anxiety, depression.
00:13:21
Speaker
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 in terms of how we actually change the neuroplasticity of our brains
00:13:42
Speaker
to rewire them to react differently to external pressures that we face on a day-to-day basis. Meditation is one of the ways that you can do that. We talk about when I actually go into companies and try and launch the pod and embed meditation as a practice, we talk about the six whys of meditation.
00:14:01
Speaker
and they are reduces stress, improves attention and creativity, the fact that it's a foundational well-being practice, the fact that successful people are doing it, which I'll come on to a bit more in a second, the fact that it's 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 more detail in a second. The reduced stress one,
00:14:27
Speaker
It's kind of linked to what I just said about cortisol and 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 at other studies that went a bit further they showed that eight weeks led to the same effect during a baseline state so not just when you were during meditation but slower amygdala response
00:14:58
Speaker
rates when you're actually just in normal day-to-day level of consciousness. And then 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
00:15:13
Speaker
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 thinking we use in brainstorms and coming up to business solutions. The third was a foundational well-being practice. So meditation doesn't just help with, you know,
00:15:42
Speaker
being good in meditation in itself. And then 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,
00:16:01
Speaker
And this is one of the biggest things for me about meditation because it has a true, you know, a positive feedback loop effects on all these different areas, you know, once you start meditating.
00:16:12
Speaker
You tend to have better decision making, 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 healthily. When you're eating more healthily, you do more exercise, you do more exercise, you sleep better, and so on and so on. And all these areas tend to have a compound feedback effect, 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.
00:16:40
Speaker
And what meditation tends to do is it just puts that slight barrier between the thought and the action sometimes. So rather than getting blown around in the winds of your emotions and thoughts, it just gives you that extra second 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.
00:17:04
Speaker
And I only wish I had discovered this earlier 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. Yeah, I think there's a lot in that. I really do. I've come to think of my modest meditation practice of 20 minutes a day as really the other side of the coin of
00:17:32
Speaker
of an ongoing, yeah, essentially sort of therapy. You know, the two really do go together, working on understanding your own triggers and your own, you know, 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, yeah, I think there's a good chance you can sort of ride that wave.
00:17:59
Speaker
You mentioned Silicon Valley and a lot of those big tech companies are the innovators. They're the first on board when it comes to biophilic design. They're the first on board when it comes to workplace wellness.
Workplace Wellness Leaders & Studies
00:18:11
Speaker
They're really leading the way. So no doubt, it will be a very interesting pitch to be in on when you get in front of someone at Amazon or Facebook, for example, to get your pods in there. But thinking sort of slightly more of a wider market into sort of London's corporate world of
00:18:28
Speaker
legal offices and insurers and so on, or even banking offices. How would you imagine if there was, say, a wellbeing champion within that business who was able to at least get you an introduction in there? And then obviously the questions start coming up around 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?
00:18:56
Speaker
How could you collect some kind of data to corroborate or at least show that it's being well adopted by the staff on that particular floor or within that building?
00:19:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really crucial point, Matt, and something that I thought about a lot from the start of this and how we bake that 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 skeptical view of some of the wellness offerings as a result. And I think really important for internal stakeholders, obviously, to have that justification and
00:19:36
Speaker
take people on the journey with them and have that story and data to sort of back up that, yes, this is working. It's providing us some return on investment and some value. When we install 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.
00:20:01
Speaker
who we need to kind of market it or make the awareness of it more known to who aren't using it currently. And then obviously qualitative measures like employee feedback are really useful as well.
00:20:16
Speaker
the anecdotal measurements such as people's performance who are using it, like self-assessment in terms of their wellbeing. And then also, we do offer to help advise on more, I suppose, 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. There was a famous one in the US by insurance company Aetna,
00:20:41
Speaker
who showed that their introduction of a mindfulness program led to an extra $3,000 a year in productivity from their teams. So there are also large-scale testing programs that you can
00:20:54
Speaker
put in place to measure that. And also, you know, we'll be looking at stuff like healthcare costs, you know, the reduced amount of claims that they see as a result of that as this is a preventative medicine, really. And then, you know, reduced rates of absenteeism, presenteeism, things like staff turnover. Yeah, there's all kind of sorts of things that you can measure. It depends how how deep they want to go, really.
00:21:20
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. And to be fair, I'm putting you on the spot there, but the reality is from the owner or developer or from the corporate side, clearly there is no one answer to these problems. It's a case of creating a nurturing environment that
00:21:36
Speaker
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 should have a seat at the table for sure. I'm just wondering, 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
00:22:04
Speaker
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 and indeed 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 businesses in
00:22:28
Speaker
in creating innovative, interesting and engaging workspaces, right? Where meditation could be a part of that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's an incredibly interesting time. Like you say, I think there's a short to medium term change and then a long term change as well. I wrote a blog post recently actually around this exact topic actually called human centric offices.
00:22:56
Speaker
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 stats have been coming out overwhelmingly in favor of that. I think there was a YouGov survey recently which showed I think foreign people don't want to sort of carry on in the same way as it was before. So there's some really compelling reasons for going back to the office, but also some compelling reasons for how we can sort of
00:23:24
Speaker
carry on all the goodness that we've got from this remote working experience.
00:23:33
Speaker
It works for more experienced staff with this remote working, but we've got to remember that there's a whole swathe of people coming into work at the moment who are missing out on that face-to-face collaboration. The relationships we spoke about, being able to solve complex problems, the ease of conversation, not dropping out halfway through because of bad Wi-Fi, all that kind of stuff. There's lots of good reasons for getting people back to the office, but I think we need to
00:24:01
Speaker
convince people a little bit and there's so many 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
00:24:26
Speaker
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 put top of the agenda and enticing people back making them feel comfortable about coming back to work or the safety measures 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
00:24:50
Speaker
really this idea about 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 you know some positive kind of mental health benefits from it at the same time. This idea about kind of premiumizing the office similarly I think the two sort of go hand in hand and all the subjects that obviously you know close to your heart like biophilic design
00:25:20
Speaker
are going to be really crucial here but you know other stuff like you know almost like ideas like making the the office like more of a art gallery you know making it interactive making it more experiential making it very shareable
00:25:34
Speaker
I think there's going to be a huge talent flight to companies that really get that right. And clearly, 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 cotton on to that. And hopefully, yeah, we can be part of the solution for people that want to be involved in that as well.
00:26:03
Speaker
Another trend that you're nicely positioned to fit in with, I think, is around the shift to environmental, social and governance, or ESG oriented policies.
Mental Health in ESG Policies
00:26:16
Speaker
at the real estate developer and an owner, say landlord level. 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. So someone who's done a modest piece of training around, yeah, understanding how to help someone who, if there isn't a full HR department,
00:26:43
Speaker
available, at least there's someone there who's kind of the dedicated go-to person that you can talk to. 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 building certification systems for sure are a way to, in a sense, kind of encourage the industry to move in the right direction.
00:27:04
Speaker
That then leads me onto the idea of the green buildings and the materials. You mentioned briefly how you're producing all the materials that you're using for the pods. In terms of the manufacturing process itself, talk to us just briefly about how you've gone about that. Because effectively, it is a product. Are you manufacturing in the UK? Are you manufacturing abroad and importing? What's your current setup in that sense?
00:27:34
Speaker
Yeah, UK manufacturing at the moment, it was tempting to go down the road of Far East or Eastern Europe because obviously 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 the UK and keep it as local as possible.
00:27:56
Speaker
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 tree, 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.
00:28:22
Speaker
We use walnut veneer in the pod number two and obviously that has also got some good eco sustainability creds in fact that veneer is a very low wastage option for wood. So yeah there are main kind of ways that we're trying to help sustainability in terms of the
00:28:45
Speaker
the materials that we use, but we also donate to the World Land Trust as well for every pod that's 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. It puts more community on things like, so it puts more emphasis on things like community.
00:29:11
Speaker
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 talk 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
00:29:29
Speaker
exposing more people to how meditation can really help open their mind and be more aware of sustainability and the decisions that we make and how they impact everything else. Yeah, it's definitely very closely aligned with that, the idea of the people and planet.
00:29:48
Speaker
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 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 considering how to
00:30:14
Speaker
adapt or adjust their workplace environment going back in after a year or perhaps more of working from home. What's the one thought that really is driving everything you're doing that you'd sort of put up on a billboard? Well, 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
00:30:43
Speaker
guide or my take on what the guide is for managing that transition for us back into the workspace. I think if something on a billboard would maybe say
00:30:56
Speaker
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.
00:31:27
Speaker
Best of luck, man. I think you're on to something. I wish you every success over the coming years. Thank you very much, Matt. It's a pleasure talking to you. Thanks for having me.