It’s 6 p.m. when Susan Hagg emerges from her corporate cubicle at Skyworks Solutions Inc. and heads to a meeting where deep breathing and body twisting is required.
In a room where the semiconductor company normally holds engineering classes, Hagg and a handful of other T-shirt-clad co-workers contort their bodies while listening to soothing music during an after-hours company yoga class. By the end of the 90-minute session, the employees practically float out of class.
At businesses across the country, yoga is hot. Techies are doing it. Marketing companies are doing it. Bankers are doing it. Even some government workers are doing it.
And most are doing it on the corporate dime, as companies are sponsoring yoga classes to boost productivity, keep sick days down and reduce anxiety among workers.
“There’s no question that for me it helps me to relieve stress,” said Hagg, senior manager of training and development at the Irvine-based Skyworks. “It gets rid of the
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after-effects of being hunched over the computer all day.”
While large corporations have invested for years in wellness programs such as job-site exercise rooms and health-education classes, health and fitness experts said yoga is gaining steam in the workplace.
“Twenty-five years ago, this was a pretty hard sell,” said national yoga expert Beryl Bender Birch, author of “Power Yoga.” “But now corporations, both large and small, are realizing the value. If you take a break to do yoga in the middle of the day, it really does increase production.”
Yoga instructors say it is rewarding to do corporate yoga because it brings calm to people who are leading hectic lives.
Though the thought of a bunch of executives taking a yoga timeout seems a bit comical, experts say stress-releasing scenes of employees on yoga mats are driving yoga’s popularity.
Birch, one of the first instructors in the country to bring yoga into the corporate world, said what sets yoga apart from other job-site wellness programs is its focus on the body and mind.
“They [workers] do it, and get more centered and feel less overwhelmed by work and less scattered.”
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Edited by Lara Weber ([email protected]) and Drew Sottardi ([email protected])