To retool companies for the new world of work, managers need fresh insights into what makes their teams tick. With staff routinely working from home, and many expecting to visit offices much less frequently, leaders can no longer rely on water-cooler moments to fuel innovation and growth.

One solution is performance coaching, a talking technique that proponents say can untangle gnarly workplace problems. Coaching has long been the preserve of senior management, but leaders and coaches alike say it’s time to open it up to lower-level workers.

“Organizations have felt battered in recent times, and people can lose confidence in understanding what teams are going through or how to lead them,” says Philippa Thomas, a BBC News presenter and leadership coach who contributed to a peer-reviewed academic study on coaching and remote work with researchers from the University of East London.

The study, published on March 11 in the journal Coaching, offered employees at a U.K.

financial-services company coaching on positive psychology, which focuses on well-being and strengths. The authors found that participants felt able to raise concerns about how to make their voices heard and speak openly about their own leadership and performance.

“Coaching gives people a nonjudgmental space,” Thomas says. “It helps identify new skills you might need and those you already have.”

Coaching often defies easy description, but it’s usually a 1-to-1 conversation aimed at helping the coach navigate or solve a specific situation. It can range from a focus on skills to a psychodynamic approach more akin to therapy.

Veterans of “command and control”-style leadership are often reluctant to embrace the idea because it takes time to deliver results, and those can be hard to measure. Even as the university study highlights the benefits of personal coaching for remote workers, increasing numbers of large companies in Britain are embracing the idea as a pathway to improved collaboration and productivity. Thomas works with peers at other major companies, such as GlaxoSmithKline Plc and John Lewis Partnership Plc, which have committed to a coaching culture. Prince Harry’s recent appointment at coaching and mental health firm BetterUp Inc. points to mainstream growth in the U.S., too.

Many big companies have a coaching budget for senior leaders, and some smaller ones may be able to coach their whole staff, but for most companies that would be a budget-buster. So Costas Markides, professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at London Business School, recommends deploying coaching-savvy senior managers to facilitate sessions or limiting coaching plans to teams with specific needs.

“Normally, internal leaders would not spend time discovering and understanding internal conflicts,” he says. “But there is a beneficial element to talking about it. Coaches lubricate the process.”

Nevertheless, managers hungry for a productivity bump in 2021 should resist the lure of coaching without clear goals, says Penelope Jones, founder of coaching practice My So-Called Career. “It almost puts the onus on the individuals to solve the problem,” she says, comparing a coaching program that doesn’t address underlying issues to what she calls “corporate yoga.”

“The win for business leaders in this stage is to actively listen and facilitate meaningful conversations,” Jones says. “So when they rebuild, they rebuild deliberately.”

Coaching can be a hard sell because it forces participants to hand over a precious workplace commodity—time—without promising easily

quantifiable results, but advocates say the benefits become obvious over the longer term. For Thomas, the publication of a peer-reviewed study on the value of coaching for remote workers is a key step toward proving the importance of the practice.

“There is often skepticism regarding expensive coaching,” she says. “But if you’re looking at issues of effective team-working, collaboration that brings up new thinking, and allowing your leaders to be heard and be more resilient, my question is not whether can you afford to do it, but can you afford not to?”

Source: Bloomberg