It’s time for ‘inner engineering’

G Sankaranarayanan / Chennai

Spirituality as a stress-buster is becoming popular among software companies with ‘corporate gurus’ offering specialised programmes on yoga and meditation (Y&M). This write-up tries to find the connection between stress-free environment and bug-free software.

At Lason India, right from the managing director to the entry-level employees, everyone works hard for better quarterly results. However, the results are of a different kind that they do not talk about net profit but net happiness and about peace per employee rather than profit. The whole exercise is to move the organisation up the higher levels of ‘spiritual maturity model’.

Corporate classes with a difference

Lason had introduced teaching classes on Y&M a year back to all its employees. Its chief executives breath their way to a stress-free world as they are taught how to deploy the “bliss tools” by the yoga masters, who take classes for them at their own convenient time and place. Group classes are organised for junior staff members every week in eight-member batches.

Once in a quarter, the master evaluates each individual’s progress based on factors like breathing aspects, regularity in meditation and asanas, and accordingly promotes the participant to the next level of the programme. Individual attention is given to every participant and the master offer specific solutions to their health and work-related problems such as back pain, stress, hypertension, etc.

“Our goal is to reach Y&M to all our 3,000-odd employees before this year end,” says Jyothi Menon, head of human resources. “We introduced Y&M classes because we really want our employees to take a holistic approach to life and health. We do not believe in simply handing over a gym membership to them.” She says that employees’ response to the programmes has been overwhelming.

For employees’ health

Organisations like Lason are convinced that introducing such programmes is a holistic way to keep employees healthy. As is, the IT career is associated with long working hours, monotony, frequent changes in role definitions and the pressure of constant learning. There is a view that the typical lifestyle of software professionals (including the food habits, sedentary work style) is prone to health problems—especially that are related to cardio-vascular diseases. Thanks to the mind-boggling opportunities afforded by the IT industry, the aspirational levels of a software engineer is at any rate higher than say that of a civil engineer. Hence, the need to teach employees how to lead a balanced life, in the first place.

Demand for courses

As more and more organisations are ‘turning spiritual’, there is a growing demand for Y&M courses. Coinciding with the demand is the rise of corporate savvy ‘spiritual’ organisations, which train people on ‘transcendental meditation’, ‘Art of Living’ and ‘Isha yoga’, etc. The modern spiritual gurus are forthcoming and geared up to take spirituality into the ‘object-oriented’ software industry. Armed with scientific validations, they take a rational approach, while answering questions like: “Is spirituality a state of mind?” “Is it different from religion?” “Is it scientific?” “Can it be taught?” and “What are its benefits to bottomline?”

“To be spiritual is an inner experience. To be spiritual means to transcend the limitations of the physical. The transcendence cannot be taught but the methods that lead to the transcendence have to be taught,” says Jaggi Vasudev, a renowned spiritual guru and founder of Isha Foundation, a non-profit organisation built on “fostering physical, mental and spiritual well-being.” He adds: “It is like you cannot make a flower bloom but can cultivate the necessary atmosphere for it to bloom.”

Isha Foundation conducts programmes like Inner Engineering for Effortless Living tailor-made for IT organisations, among others, like Infosys. The programmes involve simple postures and meditation.

Vasudev explains: “Meditation is not something that you do, but something that you become. It is a quality, not an act. If one becomes meditative it will naturally permeate into everything that he does. It is like a fragrance...it spreads into everything.”

It’s scientific

As it’s understood in the corporate circles, spirituality, when restricted only to Y&M, is totally scientific. Yoga is just a breathing technique, while meditation, a method of “loosing yourself in yourself” just as one does in music, paintings, work, etc.

For instance, the promised benefits of being in ‘a mindless state’ of meditation (a phrase better describes the subject than ‘a state of mind’) such as stress reduction, increase in concentration and memory, enhanced creativity and efficiency and increased productivity are validated by modern branches of science: biology, physiology and psychology.

Solution for stress

With the understanding that being spiritual is about “losing oneself” in duty, Suresh B Kamath, chairman of Laser Soft Info Systems, says the solution for stress is spirituality, as it is taught in India for thousands of years. With “feed your head and heart with work” as his philosophy Kamath feels “so active and never tired at all,” whether it’s 9:30 am, when he starts off his work at office or at 2:30 am when he just finishes his reading for the day before going to sleep. Started in 1986 with a small team, Laser Soft today has evolved to become the third most important player in the Indian banking software industry with a registered a turnover of over Rs 30 crore.

Kamath believes that the body gets inputs from various sources. “Inputs such as what we eat, what we hear, what we read, what we think, etc, determine our behaviour to a large extent. I consider work also as an input. When we work with dedication and selfless spirit, we increase our ability to work more and enhance our faculty. I can remember, for instance, each and every line of the codes that I wrote as a programmer in my initial days way back in 1986.”

Kamath laments that unfortunately many in the software industry lose interest in work, innovation and “burn out” their entire life at a very young age itself when they consider work with ego-centric desires.

When employees work under stress, they transfer the same to others working around. Several studies reveal that the quality of a developer’s experience gets reflected in the quality of a user’s experience. That is, the more stress free the developer is while developing a software product the better the quality of the software will be.

Y&M is again the most preferred avenue to relieve stress at India’s leading software firm, Infosys. “Yoga does relieve stress to a great extent and certainly improves efficiency in work,” says Usha Pattabiraman, a senior HR executive at Infosys, Chennai. “However, stress relief is only one of the several benefits of yoga. Yoga also enhances memory and is an effective tool to a healthy body and mind.”

According to her around 250 employees have benefited from yoga programmes so far. “We are currently extending this programme to our contract staff as well. There is certainly more interest among the lower and middle management groups and the senior management is convinced about the benefits of this yoga programme.”

Aarti Arvind, HR manager with ThinkSoft, Chennai says, “Spending long hours in front of the computer also takes its toll in the form of back and shoulder problems, for which yoga is proven to be beneficial.”

“IT jobs are high pressure jobs which quite often involve long hours so it can be quite stressful. Weekends do offer a break, but it’s important that individuals learn to manage stress and yoga is a perfect way of doing so. It helps the person relax and definitely can play an important role in ensuring that the individual stays healthy,” she believes.

The participants of the programmes, without exception, feel energetic and are able to be more focused and hence more productive. “There have been a number of cases where it has helped to improve and sometime completely cure back and shoulder related problems,” says Arvind, adding that another significant benefit of Yoga is that it helps people relax which is very important in IT related jobs.

ThinkSoft organises sessions by experts who understand the needs of the group and teach asanas that help to improve overall flexibility and general health. The programmes typically span over two-three months and till now around 30-40 people have participated in such sessions. The instructors start out by getting to know the group to ensure that if anyone has any problems (back pain, etc) they give them individual attention to help with the problem.

Kamath believes that only a grand spiritual (selfless, in other words) goal that goes beyond short-term revenue considerations that can make products stay longer like the great temples of hundreds of years heritage that people of all faiths built around the world. “Many IT products are developed only with money in mind and are launched with much fanfare. But how many of them are alive more than a year?” he asks.

The common experience of the software industry, otherwise, is such that almost 80 percent of its projects do not meet neither deadlines nor cost estimates. Around the same percentage of products, as if loyal to the fam-ous ‘80 by 20 rule’, fail in the marketplace.

Given the fact that the spiritual quotient offers an opportunity for people to go beyond material considerations, it might just help organisations to come up with the right solutions at the right time.

sankar@expresscomputeronline.com