Can teamwork be improved by starting meetings with a brief mindfulness intervention? – Preliminary evidence from a pilot study

This experimental study investigates the effect of a brief mindfulness intervention at the beginning of team-meetings on meeting quality, team mindfulness and psychological safety. Despite many studies about mindfulness interventions which aim to increase individual mindfulness of workers, very little is known about what impact mindfulness interventions can have on the team level.

For this study, we have developed a short mindfulness-based intervention that can be carried out by team leaders with relatively little training at the beginning of their team-meetings. Eleven team leaders participated with their teams. In the first phase of the study, which took place over the course of four weeks, the team leaders administered a standardized text-based intervention of roughly four minutes at the beginning of their weekly team meeting.

We measured team mindfulness, psychological safety and meeting quality before and after the intervention via an online questionnaire. Additionally, we collected qualitative data from the team members by asking open questions in the questionnaire as well as by concluding focus group interviews with the team leaders.

Preliminary data suggests that the brief mindfulness intervention at the beginning of team meetings had a significantly positive influence on team mindfulness as well as on psychological safety. The focus group interviews with the team leaders revealed potential for making the mindfulness intervention even more effective. Further data from the second phase of the study, which is aiming to measure the long-term effects of the intervention, is collected at the end of January and ready for presentation at the conference.