The Corporate Edge

Reasons for Businesses to Use Coaching Services

Changing workplace demographics and 24/7 information flow have created faster business cycles and increased demands placed upon managers and executives (Harvard Business Review, 2006). Successful career climbing now includes; more extensive sets of relationships, increased standards for interpersonal skills, and intensified competition influenced by accessible global markets (Harvard Management Update, 2007).

These things combined have created more intense work cultures and unstable careers and employees, and thus a greater sense of urgency regarding the need for hands-on support in: stabilizing frazzled managers, executives, and employees in the workforce and continuing to harness their energy for efficient personal and professional growth.

When stressed employees are the norm and not the exception, the entire workplace is greatly affected. Stress lowers employees' resistance and makes them more vulnerable to illness and disease and more forgetful and distracted. They will eventually exercise poor problem-solving skills and make more mistakes. The cost of all of the above to U.S. employers is $300 billion a year in absenteeism, decreased productivity, staff turnover, and worker's compensation insurance.

Research notes that workplace coaching yields a return on investment exhibited by improved working relationships with most immediate subordinates, supervisors, and peers as well as increase in job satisfaction and organizational commitment (MetrixGlobal, 2001); improved performance for the individual and a competitive edge as reported by International Coaching Federation and Linkage, Inc. (1999). Any one of these may translate into increased profits as cited in one study to be as much as $500,000 to $1,000,000 (Fisher, 2002).