Coach Wellness
Workplace trainers apply a tailored, personal approach in helping employees face health, lifestyle issues
At the end of this past spring's exhausting tax season, Quincy auditor Jasmine Hsu began having doubts. She wasn't sure she wanted to stay in a field that demanded all-consuming, 60-hour workweeks for a big part of each year. And she especially longed to find time to exercise again.
So Hsu dialed "Coach on Call," the work-life balance counselor available nationwide to employees of Minneapolis-based accounting firm RSM McGladrey Inc. In one hourlong telephone session, "Coach Karen" Lanson helped Hsu set a realistic first goal of getting to the gym a couple of times a month, then building from there.
"She emphasized a lot, when you want to make a change, you start little by little," says Hsu, a senior associate in the company's auditing division who recently felt fit enough to run a three-mile road race. "She made me look at my life in a more realistic way."
Workplace coaches are expanding beyond the boardroom and into new frontiers. Once an executive perk largely focused on career issues, today's coaching is used by a small but growing number of companies to help employees with work-life and wellness challenges. About one-third of US companies now offer health and lifestyle coaching, according to the Society for Human Resource Management's first tally of the extent of the benefit this year.
In a world of chain-store homogeneity and faceless call center help, this is a trend that bears watching. Although usually provided by an outside vendor, the new coaches nonetheless have a personal and often face-to-face, long-term relationship with employees, and they deliver tailored guidance - not one-size programs or pamphlets - on issues from long hours to cholesterol counts. Typically, the services are free to employees.
"I tend to say to new callers, 'we can talk about anything that you feel in your personal or professional life is impacting your happiness, success, feelings of satisfaction,' " says Lanson, a Minneapolis consultant who's been coaching RSM McGladrey's employees several days a month since early 2007. Telephone sessions with Lanson, once capped at five, are now unlimited. Lanson tells employees, "This is going to be a focused conversation on what's keeping you up at night."
This summer, New York City's Corporate Counseling Associates added maternity leave coaching and work-life coaching to its traditional employee assistance programs for employers. "Clients asked for it," says Georgia Christimilios. "What's come up so much in executive coaching is, 'I'm pulling my hair out. I can't balance.' "
Pioneering MITRE Corp. has offered an on-site counselor-coach twice weekly for 15 years in Bedford and for five years in McLean, Va., its two major US locations, says Bill Albright, work-life and benefits director at the not-for-profit, which provides information technology and other support to the government. "There's that continuity and sense of trust." says the McLean coach, Dale Rampell, "I get to know the organization. There's a comfort in that."
A different kind of balance inspires Tom Harper, a data center manager with
"This gives me the ability to take care of myself. I don't go to the doctor's to talk about diets and stuff," says Harper, who also gets a weekend booster call from another coach as part of the company's Health for Life program. The initiative, started in late 2006, is managed by Take Care Health Systems LLC. Harper says of the coaches, "I know them, they know me, they know my habits. It's very personable."
A good coach offers employees first the chance to step back and gain needed perspective on hard-to-see patterns of life, from eating habits to time management. Next, the coach often shows how realistic, small adjustments can lead to snowballing, positive changes. Developing a relationship is key.
"With this real person, we get a genuine smile, genuine encouragement," says Meg Macheski, a mail room clerk at Manchester, Vt.-based The Vermont Country Store. Visiting an on-site wellness coach from Colchester, Vt., provider Marathon Health has helped Macheski keep off the 50 pounds she lost years ago, and keep her blood pressure and cholesterol in check without medication. Additionally, Macheski saves about $600 a year by having her quarterly blood work done at the office.
Perhaps most importantly, a good coach doesn't hand people quick fixes, but rather inspires them to carve out their own solutions. That's what RSM McGladrey's director of talent management Teresa Hopke was aiming for when she created the Coach on Call program to operate alongside the company's wellness and new parent coaching services.
"We have knowledge workers, so we felt like we needed to empower them to come up with their own answers," says Hopke. "All these companies that have wonderful programs in place, that's all great, but unless your employees know what to do with them, I don't think that anyone is going to have the work-life success they're looking for."
Maggie Jackson's Balancing Acts column appears every other week. She can be reached at maggie.jackson@att.net. 
