Burnout Prevention and Mobile Mindfulness: Evaluation of an App-Based Health Training Program for Employees

Abstract

Mindfulness recently attracted growing interest beyond classical therapeutic contexts and has been adopted in preventive labor contexts and occupational health. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of a mobile mindfulness training app regarding work and health indicators. Participants were employees and assigned randomly to the intervention and control groups. 146 employed participants in the intervention group used the mobile application '7mind' for 14 days. Comparisons were made with 160 employed participants from the control group, who were given access to the app after finishing the study (wait-list control). After two weeks of use, significant effects of the training were indicated by better results for the intervention group as compared to the control group. Some of the effect sizes can be considered as large: participants in the intervention group improved in measures of mindfulness, work engagement, job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, emotional intelligence, innovation and creativity, and self-efficacy. Conventional mindfulness training programs are organized in groups. Our study demonstrates for the first time the effectiveness of a mobile mindfulness training app in the work context. The mobile app offers an easy and flexible access to training mindfulness and improving work and health-related indicators.