Professor Jonathan Passmore
Senior VP of Coaching, CoachHub
New approaches to workplace training and coaching are helping employees harness individual skills to become more effective.
Experts suggest that conventional training seminars and workshops are no longer enough to help employee development. A more personalised service is needed to properly train and track people’s learning.
Personalised approach
Professor Jonathan Passmore, who has conducted research into how employees deal with new relationships with work and how coaching can empower talent to find their best potential. According to him, traditional training techniques assume that all employees are “starting at the same place and need to end up at the same place.”
“But the world of work is more complicated,” he adds. “Individuals start at different places and they have to apply the knowledge they are given in different ways because they are working in different contexts. Secondly, the nature of training is changing because people are preferring more personalised approaches.”
Digital platforms existed pre-COVID but have taken off because many people are working in hybrid ways.
Individual tastes
He says people increasingly want to be treated as individuals in their personal lives and expect that choice to be translated into the work environment.
That, he continues, involves individual coaching that “helps people identify their values, personal strengths, and goals” and apply them in the context in which they are operating.
The transition to a digital world is supporting this, particularly with more people working remotely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Digital platforms existed pre-COVID but have taken off because many people are working in hybrid ways,” says Professor Passmore, who has recently joined CoachHub as Senior VP of Coaching.
“It also provides a digital platform with a GDPR-compliant, highly-secure and confidential conversation in a convenient way, without the coach or manager having to travel to have that one-to-one coaching conversation.”
Digital coaching platform
As a digital coaching platform, CoachHub offers employees on all levels – from top executives to interns – a personalised coaching journey, using algorithms to match workers with coaches. It also refers participants to a digital library to build on the “knowledge they acquire in those reflective coaching conversations.”
While one-to-one coaching can consume time, he believes it is ultimately a better use of time as it delivers coaching that is relevant to the person’s needs, work environment and role.
“You start with the knowledge the person has and build from there and personalise it to what they need to know to achieve what they want,” he says.
“If you can leverage all of the organisation in a cost-effective, convenient, scalable solution, then you are able to get much better organisational outcomes, protecting the wellbeing of the workforce and improving performance.”