Once a familiar refrain, a “top-down” approach to dealing with dynamic changes at work is not an effective way to plan for a more resilient future. For true organizational impact and growth to occur, every employee needs to be invested in the cause.
Complex change is now a constant feature of the personal and professional lives of employees at all levels of companies. As such, learning and development leaders — especially chief learning officers — are asked to arm the workforce with the skills they need to thrive through uncertainty.
The unvarnished truth is that if we want to help employees build agility and resilience, deep psychological resources that bloom from the inside out, mandatory training or one-size-fits-all workshops aren’t going to cut it.
Good news: There is new evidence about the effectiveness of coaching as a critical solution to this problem.
New research from our lab at BetterUp reveals that employees who received personalized coaching in the early days of the pandemic were more likely to develop an internal “resiliency buffer” they could tap into during the resulting times of tumult and change. Following two cohorts of 1,000-plus people in total over several months, researchers learned that coached individuals were four times as resilient as those in the uncoached cohort.
In the toughest of times — the chaos of the earliest months of lockdown, pre-vaccine, with school closures, office shutdowns and sudden business pivots — those with coaching grew their resilience at an unprecedented rate, while those without it flailed.
In addition to resilience, coached individuals experienced a significant edge over uncoached individuals in other important areas like productivity (+129 percent), optimism (+112 percent) and life satisfaction (+129 percent) by a large margin. On the other side of the coin, data shows that uncoached workers experience declines in productivity in addition to hits to their life satisfaction and optimism.
As company growth slows and budgets shrink, organizational leadership is asking their people to do more with less. Unfortunately, most organizations aren’t providing the right kinds of personalized, evidence-based support for their employees as they attempt to navigate continually evolving and unpredictable contexts — especially as they struggle with burnout and decreased well-being. For example, organizations have turned to traditional upskilling and wellness initiatives to help employees cope, but these approaches don’t deliver long-term change or tend to focus on acute intervention after a challenge has already occurred.
Our new study reveals how coaching can be an effective intervention to help build proactive skills that employees can use over and over again as a response to pervasive uncertainty.
The study also showed that coaching is incredibly effective at driving lasting behavior change both now and later. Coaching helps people build psychological capital that enhances their well-being and keeps them grounded, both in the present and the future.
With the help of a coach, individuals learn to do more than just prevent feelings of helplessness; they develop reframing and emotional regulation skills, as well as self-efficacy and optimism, which in turn lead to increased resilience in difficult situations and even spurred subsequent growth after the fact. Employees gain the strength they need to bounce back from challenges — and some even stronger because of those difficulties, a form of growth known as anti-fragility.
The success of organizations now rests on executive leadership’s ability to democratize access to resources that prepare employees for the future. We hope our study helps to shore up the evidence base needed to show that personalized development coaching is an effective tool to proactively build resilience to buffer the hard times and preserve employee productivity and well-being even in the toughest climates.
