How to Make Health Coaching Effective
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Health coaching has become a popular method of promoting employee health for three primary reasons. First, health coaching is similar to the medical model in which there is one healthcare provider and one patient. This creates a level of comfort among employees who receive coaching. Second, having a health coach carries a positive social stigma much like having a personal trainer or a private chef. Third, it is relatively easy to become a “health coach,” so the market is saturated with the coaching “value proposition.”
While the employee-coach and doctor-patient interaction may seem similar, there is a noteworthy difference. Health coaching has no reimbursement system. Someone, usually the employer, has to pay for health coaching. A company investing in health coaching as the primary means of behavior change strategy, should ask whether they would be as willing to invest in the services of a personal trainer or private chef for all their employees. Put another way, companies should ask for evidence of cost-effectiveness before investing a single penny in health coaching as a primary intervention.
Perhaps a better model on which to base wellness programs is the educational system. Students learn in groups. Groups enable powerful motivators like competition and collaboration. If wellness programs were modeled on the educational system, they would be designed to help groups of people at the same time and those with special challenges would get extra help. In school, that means a tutor. In wellness, that could mean a health coach.
We will be discussing these and other coaching issues in our upcoming webinar, “Health Coaching: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. You can register for the webinar here. You can also learn about how we do Integrated Health Coaching by clicking here.
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