Summary

This report aims to give a brief introduction about a mindfulness training program in If insurance and propose a recommendation for the situation.

Anders Madsen was a leader of Risk Management Services in the Industrial Division of If which was a leading enterprise of property and casualty insurance company in Europe. It had 6400 employees to serve for 3.6 million customers over the world. The company’s four core values are accessible, reliable, dedicated and innovative.

There were 30 employees in his Denmark group. Although they were well-educated and highly-trained, they cannot deal with the information overload problem very well. Most of them tried to multi-task to address the complex challenges. However, Madsen’s research showed that multi-tasking was not a good way of working. In other words, multi-tasking is counterproductive. Employees just wasted time switching tasks from one to another. Eventually, the employees experienced a high level of pressure and stress.

Being aware of these above, Madsen tried to look for a method which can make a real transformation of workers’ mind and positively change their thinking habits. Mindfulness referred to the ability to focus one’s mind on one thing at a time. In addition, a great deal evidence showed that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was effective to reduce stress. Finally, Corporate-Based Mindfulness Training (CBMT) was conducted in If in 2009 in order to address the information overload problem.

During the 8-week program, the employees spent several hours taking an intensive introductory session at first. Subsequently, participants were introduced to some mindfulness techniques, and training were related to application of mindfulness to work.

After 8 weeks, although the participation rate dropped during the program, the remaining participants felt that mindfulness was effective to help them focus on their work on hand so that their work efficiency could be developed. Besides, some of...