The Yoga Teacher vs. Facebook

A yoga teacher hired by Facebook to teach a weekly class for their employees was fired this week because she chastised a student who was using her phone during the class.

"We are in the business of providing great customer service," said her termination notice from Plus One Health Management [the corporate fitness company that Facebook went through to employ her]. "Unless a client requires us to specifically say no to something, we prefer to say yes whenever possible."

While saying yes as often as possible seems like the yogic thing to do, I feel like this teacher was treated unfairly. A no cell phone policy is pretty standard for all yoga classes, out of respect for our fellow students and for our own safety (if we're paying more attention to our phones than the instructor, we could miss an important verbal or visual cue and hurt ourselves). I would think that Facebook chose to hold in-office yoga sessions precisely to help employees unplug. Even if the employee didn't feel the rule applied to her, I would expect the yoga instructor's boss to use this as a teaching moment for the Facebook execs who hired their company.

On the other hand, this reminds me of something that happened during a spin class I attended a few years ago. After the last tough song, as we slowed our legs and marveled at what a great workout we'd had, one woman in the class commented loudly something to the effect of, "YEAH, maybe some people should GET OFF THEIR CELL PHONES AND ACTUALLY GET SOMETHING OUT OF THE CLASS." Heads swiveled to the woman in the class who was, at that moment, on her Blackberry (and presumably had been throughout the class). The woman looked pretty affronted and fired back that this was the only way she could get away from her desk and get her workout in -- by still checking in from time to time. (Though she didn't say it quite so nicely.) Until that moment, I had never considered that people might not be checking their texts, but might just be on call, and it made me feel a bit more sympathetic to those who check their phones during class. They may not get as much out of their class, but they are getting something, which is better than nothing, so now I try my best to keep my eyes on my own mat and not let it distract me.

Regardless of whether or not the Facebook employee had a good reason for being on her phone, I think the instructor was just doing her job and shouldn't have been fired for this. It seems like a good opportunity to talk to her techie students about why it's important to unplug and it would be a real shame if Facebook did away with their in-office yoga sessions because of this conflict.


What do you think? Was the instructor right to tell the student to stop using her phone in class? Share your thoughts in the comments! 

- Rachel 

Yoga teacher fired over cell phone ban at Facebook [SFGate]