The role of health and wellness coaching in worksite health promotion.

Health and wellness coaching has rapidly become a best practice element of worksite health promotion programs. Coaching as a process is a very old technology, but its use in the field of health promotion is relatively new. Coaching can be provided in different forms or modalities yet currently lacks a rigorous science base or a defined set of standards or common elements. In larger worksite settings several variants or forms of coaching are usually provided to employee populations. The need for more proactive and direct forms of intervention in health promotion is contributing to the rapid growth of coaching programs. There are currently an assortment of coaching strategies or techniques that are in common use in most coaching interventions. A main contention of current coaching practice is that coaching that uses facilitation strategies rather than prescriptive advice is more effective at producing long term behavior change. The congruence and size of wellness incentives with the coaching process are likely to be of significant importance. From a long term perspective, coaching is likely to become a staple of worksite health promotion practice.