Iceland and New Zealand have recently implemented or piloted four working days weekly to enforce work-life balance and stimulate job satisfaction, especially after the globe got hit with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Currently, Scotland is contemplating going in this same direction as many more countries wish to explore this possibility.
Such initiative is not surprising, though, because a lot of research points to this reality of the damaging impact of COVID-19 on people. So the world is working it out to fine-tune the effect and navigate through with the best interventions with malleability. Coaching has become one of the integrative interventions more needed than ever in this human history.
When humans get hit by adversities, many things occur, our beingness gets shifted and somewhat disintegrated, and it needs re-integration and modeling to forge ahead. During pandemic times, coaching has helped leaders and employees navigate the pivoting, the changing, the uncertainty, and developing ways to support empathy, acknowledge where things are going wrong, and move forward with more harmony.
Coaching in the workplace is not new; for several years, workplace coaching has been on the rise, and since the pandemic, the need has substantially increased. However, in today’s global climate, it is essential whether executive (one-on-one) coaching or team (group) coaching, a large corporation, or a solopreneur.
Many research and surveys such as that of Development Dimensions International’s DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2021 point to the vital need for coaching, especially among business and leadership executives.
Coaching has got an incredible impact on job satisfaction and work-life balance. The shift that brings about transformation, especially in such turbulent times, stems from the beingness (ontology) of what is showing up in action or inaction, allowing the coach to ask powerful life-shifting questions to create awareness in line with ‘be-do-have”. Many experts opine that job satisfaction comes from values, passion, people, and an accomplishment sense.
Coaching helps leaders deal with uncertainty, the unknown. With the quickly changing business landscape, there is no longer the stability we once had, and most leaders do not know it all, have their insecurity and lack of knowledge on how to lead during these times. Coaching can help leaders be more effective and agile while empowering their employees and supporting them in ways that work.
When the employer can get out of their way and lean on the strengths and knowledge of their employees, the leader can focus on the bigger picture and keep the company moving forward more proactively. Even if they do not have employees, it still helps them get out of their heads and focuses on the right tasks, the bigger picture, and moving forward. Such is how leaders create a job-satisfaction environment for work-life balance and onward to promote customer experience.
Through coaching, your “why and purpose” in life get powerfully and effectively questioned. It raises a feeling of awareness, stimulates your inner core mandate, and evokes a living sense of what you are here for. It streamlines and boldens the values that need to guide and measure you live your life by. The coach supports the client to root their values in their evoked philosophical, spiritual, or moral why’s and purposes.
Our beingness goes deeper than just flesh and brain mechanization. Coaches help the coachee feel seen and heard by active listening, asking the right engaging questions, and providing feedback and guidance to help them navigate their situation. This builds a sense of connection, a human need, feeling seen, heard, and connected. When someone feels this(physiological safety), they tend to feel safer, make better decisions, be more confident in their actions, have better clarity, and are more likely to be happier with their job.
Coaches can help improve roles, tasks, bigger picture, communication between other employees or leaders. While also helping them get or stay connected to the visions, mission, values, and purpose, creating a plan to accomplish or keep on track with all of these. When all feel on the same team, have clarity in roles and direction, connection to the values vision mission and purpose, the work seems more accessible, the teams work more cohesive and efficient, and the outcomes are more profound.
A coach guides the coachee to develop a coaching plan that considers family bonding, social relations, and other essences of natural ecology, which goes a long way to allow them to be effectively functional in their endeavors. They don’t live their lives because of a career; instead, they live to impact others through their career. Service to others creates space for mentoring, allyship, diversity, inclusion, healthy team spirit, etc. They are rooted in the why and purposes of coachees who have defined and keep enhancing their beingness.
Through active listening and engaging, relevant questioning, coaches support coachees to uncover missing links, places where they might be stuck, areas where they might be overdoing things, etc. Then, while helping them navigate their life, work, and more, the coachee can make clear decisions on what is best for them
According to a 2008 research analysis in Germany and another on American college graduate, aspiration and inspiration for personal growth and development, healthy social relations, family bonding, and community service promotes job satisfaction and work-life balance. These scientific records go a long way to make signing unto coaching very important in the post-pandemic phase of human resilience.
Coaching supports the client to evolve that kind of self-leadership that will support the fundamentals to achieve goals set to grow and sustain one’s mission in life. Once the why and purpose are evoked or reposition in the face of a pandemic, a paradigm shift occurs. We begin to see how we can be meaningful to others, especially those around us or we encounter.
In one of the works of Scofray, “why great achievers hire coaches,” he opined that they do it to stimulate a sense of accomplishment emanating from coaching that goes to fulfill their identified coded “why and purpose.” Job satisfaction in the life of an employee is not solely dependent on the job itself. When a department or leader signs up for such experiential coaching, they create an environment that will also support them in living their why and purposes to the fullest.
One of the most significant impacts on job satisfaction, work-life balance, and customer experience is rooted in languaging, and paradigm shifts during coaching after the coachee evokes their why in life. For example, in another article, “Language and our words:…birthing peak performance and growth”, it was stated that ” Our perspective, insight, understanding, interpretation, declarations, promise, requests, communications, etc., which forms our worldview, all emanate from our language and words. How you describe yourself, empower, show love, and defend your territory is all done through language in its micro sense of the word. ”
“In this period of world pandemic and its transitioning, what you declare, promises you give or hold, contracts you will bid for, proposals you will make, relationships you will keep and drive will all be out of language and wording.”
Coaching transforms coachees’ language and wording to create the optimism and performance on their job and life balance that brings them fulfillment.
Coaching supports coachees to build a high level of congruency between their personal values. It allows them to embody their company’s philosophies, visions, missions, objectives, goals, etc. An outstanding work-life balance that Lynn prefers to call “work-life harmony” and job satisfaction comes from a life well defined, structured, in constant transformational processes, etc., with the support of a coach in the corner of the ring.
According to research by Tin Ren of Pekins University in 2010, it was stated that “value congruence between employees and the organization complements delegation of decision-making, substitutes for monitoring, and further improves organizational performance, especially which of the relational dimension.” In the said survey, it suggested that, “value congruence can serve as a source of intrinsic motivation for employee effort and mitigate agency problems in the workplace.”
This goes to buttress how vital coaching can evoke congruency for coachees and impact the job space. Coaching supports clients to drive towards earned success and service to others intrinsically, bringing about such paradigm shifts of congruencies. Martin Seligman has suggested that intrinsic induced earned success and service to others facilitates job satisfaction, work-life balance, and excellent customer experience.
The impact of coaching on job satisfaction and work-life balance also affects customer experience because coachees sink deep into their beingness of their “why and purposes” to socialize with people in a manner that stems from their life’s values and goals. This aids them in creating a sense of accomplishment in the service they rendered to others. In the article, “re-engineering and maximization of customer experience.”
It was cited that “…… in the same era of artificial intelligence and robotics, the way of being “human” through neuroscience, quantum physics, diversity-inclusion-equality, empathy, emotional intelligence, and the first phase of philosophy, which is called ontology, are also gaining roots in the human way of managing and coordinating with people.”
A coachee benefiting from the above essentials of coaching cardinal tools becomes a significant stimulater of effective and efficient customer experience. Consumers are not buying because of products but rather the why or story for which the companies are in business, and apple is a perfect example.
The heart and mindset behind products and services have become most significant for consumers. Client satisfaction is an essential part of having a sustainable, profitable business. A coach can help the coachee flush out the clients’ actual needs, understand the client’s pain points, create offers that speak directly to the client, and have a system to deliver what is promised (with consistency).
A coach is there to ask the hard questions, make the coachee think and process things more profound, and make sure that they live up to who they say they are, their USP, and the client is happy.
When coachee embodies the philosophies and values of their company because they have a defined one, they serve their customers best. As a result, they turn to exercise a high level of emotional intelligence through mindful practices, customer centrism through personal and company shared values, and service through personal philosophy of serving others.
An employee with job satisfaction and a work-life balance offers a heart of the same magnitude to customers. Intrinsic stimulated life values done through coaching offer higher peak performance levels than material gains and salary increment brings. It is not an accident when researchers say that salary increment euphoria does not last, but a conducive working environment, team spirit, and company philosophy can be embodied. All these are supported by coaching.
When you have a team, a leader who is connected to their work, feels heard and seen, aligned with the values, vision, mission, and purpose, you have happier employers & and employees, which creates a better client experience. Have you ever went into a restaurant and the staff was light-hearted, connected, friendly welcoming, happy to be at work, versus a place where there is tension, side comments, people not working inflow, there is a stark difference in the experience you, as the client, will have.
In Europe and America, FTSE 100 and Fortune 100 support employees in engaging in value investment via coaching and creating teams and a working environment that produces impressive performance.
Coaching has got significant impact evoking job satisfaction, work-life balance, and customer experience. For this essential purpose, I encourage businesses who are serious about growth, especially in this post-pandemic era, to support their employees, especially team leads, managers, and supervisors, to hire or sign up for coaching.
Regardless of the need for a coach, finding the right coach is crucial for your business to have a sustainable, growth-focused, positive community imprint. From needing to be inspired, improving your efficiency, seeing what you are missing, staying connected to your goals, finding your purpose, achieving more with less, hiring a coach to work with you and your team will help you succeed
Scofray is a Transformational Coach | Certified Corporate Trainer | Lead Facilitator of Zoweh Global ConsultContact: +233-243-085-932, email: [email protected]
Lynn Howard is an Entrepreneur | Executive Coach | Leadership Consultant
Contact: +….. email: [email protected]
