MEDITATION APP RELIEVED STRESS FOR EVERYONE BUT ITS OWN EMPLOYEES
Before the pandemic relegated most meetings to videoconference, employees at the mental wellness app Headspace gathered each morning at 10 a.m. for a guided meditation led by the company’s co-founder, a charismatic Brit and former monk. They sat on wooden benches in Headspace’s airy, sun-drenched office in Santa Monica, taking deep, calming breaths.
But the rest of the workday at Headspace was often less Zen. While the company’s raison d’etre was to promote mental health and well-being, many staffers described working intense hours, skipping family functions to meet deadlines and a high rate of turnover. In interviews with more than 20 people who worked at the startup from before the pandemic through earlier this year, employees depict an intense and sometimes grueling work environment.
“I absolutely had to go to therapy,” said one former staffer, who like other people who talked to Bloomberg News, spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve their future job prospects. Three other people also said they started seeing psychiatrists to help process the stress of working at the company.
Headspace was founded with a mission “to improve the health and happiness of the world.” But startups with lofty goals can often find themselves in awkward positions when they reconcile those values with actually making money. At Headspace, recruits were sold the idea of a gentler, more mindful workplace, only to find that the company demanded the same grinding schedules they heard about at other startups. “This is the downside of monetizing meditation,” said Diana Winston, director of mindfulness education at the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California Los Angeles. “It’s not like we’re going to stop the forces of capitalism.”
The company is now called Headspace Health after a merger with wellness app Ginger completed late last year — going from about 300 employees before the merger to 1,100 today. The startups were valued at $3 billion combined at the time of the deal. “Our employees are central to our mission and integral to our success,” Headspace Health said, disputing the characterization of its culture as unusually demanding. “At Headspace Health we remain focused on living out our mission and values, and best serving all of our stakeholders — most importantly, our own employees.”
Simon Perry, a former human resources executive at Headspace, said that the company’s mission was part of what drove employees to work hard. It was challenging to log off at the end of the work day, knowing that Headspace’s app was helping users who may be going through difficult times, he said. “I had a real hope and heart for growing a business through the lens of our mindful practices,” Perry said. He said he pushed himself, and his team, to ensure they were still finding worklife balance, but “in any startup, it is challenging.”
Today, as the economy reels and venture capitalists scale back investments, funding for digital health companies dropped 36 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to the previous quarter, according to the research firm CB Insights. Globally, average weekly downloads of the Headspace app in 2022 fell by almost half from highs in 2020, the year the pandemic began. But there are still plenty of people looking for some peace through meditation: Headspace has been downloaded more than 2.5 million this year alone, according to Data.ai.
Headspace got its start in 2010, founded by Rich Pierson, who worked in the advertising industry, and Andy Puddicombe, the former Buddhist monk with a degree in circus arts. Its programming walks users through meditations and other calming exercises. Headspace was one of the first tech companies to become popular for melding wellness and an iPhone app, promising the ability to be more mindful, calm and present.
Within the company, however, there was no mistaking that Headspace was a business operating in a competitive market, even in the early days, employees say.
During the pandemic, demand for Headspace’s services surged, with millions of people downloading the app, Data.ai numbers show. The company’s monthly bookings shot up by an average of 14 percent to 18 percent in 2021, according to documents.
At the same time, workplace demands went into overdrive, former employees said. Working from home, some people described sitting through back-to-back Zoom meetings for 12 or more hours.
The company did make some efforts to lessen the stress, including scheduled meditation breaks, nomeeting Fridays and “Mind Days” — a Friday off every other week. However, because the actual workload didn’t change, many employees simply worked through the days off, two people said.