Your questions, answered: Introducing Navigate Health Coaching

The same holistic approach to wellbeing you love—now with even more ways to help employees be well. We’re thrilled to introduce Navigate Health Coaching, a game-changing addition to the wellbeing industry.

With an emphasis on affordability and long-term employee wellbeing results, we're ushering in a new era of accessible and effective health coaching solutions. As with all new things, we imagine you have a few questions. That’s why we sat down with Navigate’s Chief Technology Officer, Jeremy Knipper, to share everything you need to know.

Let's start with the basics. What is Navigate Health Coaching?

Think of Navigate Health Coaching as everything you have come to expect with a lifestyle coaching program: individual support, meaningful engagement, and positive impacts on health outcomes. On top of that, add a few items from the collective wish list of what the wellness space has been asking of coaching: an approach that is more personalized, more preventive, and higher touch for the participant.

Navigate and the wellbeing industry both already know that health coaching is a great thing. For people’s lives, employers’ bottom lines, and the communities we serve. We aren’t trying to change that. What we are trying to do is create something that takes health coaching that extra 5% to create even more impact, more value, and something that can really make a difference in people’s lives long term.

Why health coaching and why now? What problem does Navigate Health Coaching solve?

It's important for any tech company to be agile and to pay attention to the evolving needs of our clients. Trends across multiple industries are telling us two big things right now.

The first trend we’re seeing is that wellbeing technology should know the needs of participants incredibly quickly—maybe even before they even realize what they need themselves. On the flip side, we also recognized a growing feeling that tech shouldn’t be the answer to all our problems. Health coaching is the perfect balance between these complex and sightly conflicting needs.

We will supply clients with both advanced technologies and solutions that seamlessly integrate humanity and personal connection. Seeing this market direction was the catalyst to kick off something Navigate has been interested in for a long time. Health coaching is an area of wellbeing we knew was ready for growth, and something we knew we could meaningfully contribute to the progress of.

When you talk about our coaching, you can absolutely say it solves the same problems any lifestyle and tobacco cessation health coaching does: outcomes improvement for high-risk employees, improved engagement with programming, and increased health awareness and prevention.

But health coaching, and specifically coaching that is as personalized and preventive as ours, can also solve more problems at a human level. That includes key priorities like loneliness, improved employee relations, employee retention, healthy sleep habits, personal empowerment, leadership skills, financial wellbeing, and stress management.

It sounds bold to say, but where webinars and video learning educate people, something like coaching activates people. That is where knowledge turns into action—and results.

How does this solution differ from other health coaching models on the market?

Most health coaching models only target high-risk employees with existing health issues. Obviously, coaching for these folks can be impactful, but designing programs with one type of participant in mind limits its preventive possibilities.

Navigate’s health coaching programs are designed beyond that limited scope. They create equal impact for any employee, at any level of wellbeing. A challenging task, but one we believe in.

We accomplish this by employing unique, science-backed markers of wellbeing. From there, we built our coaching curriculum using these markers, so that we could identify behavioral needs before they result in health issues or conditions. The same indicators also identify a participant’s strengths when it comes to their wellbeing.

We even added employee values and a personality assessment to the experience. This brings something unique to our coaching, since participants feel like their coach really understands them and knows how to motivate them.

The platform itself is also built to go above and beyond for our clients with features that enhance the employee and HR administrator’s experience. This includes full communications support, additional self-serve reporting, coach messaging, the ability for coaches to assign in-platform content, and a few other exciting features that make life easier.

Why might a company choose to add health coaching to their employee wellbeing strategy?

I could talk about this question all day, but HR leaders have heard every angle of this. I will try to keep it brief.

We all know that health coaching can improve the health of an employee population and reduce healthcare costs. For some employers, that would be the only justification needed. But the benefits of health coaching go beyond just risk reduction.

Take burnout as an example, which has become a hot topic in the wellbeing industry. By making a health coach available, employees now have an accessible resource for support in managing and coping with stress before it gets to that burnout phase. Employees who are less stressed (whether that be financial stress, family stress, or workplace stress) are more productive and happier at work. That’s why we’re implementing a holistic approach to coaching.

Health coaching shows employees that their organization values them as people, and that the company is willing to invest in their overall health and wellbeing. This sense of value can improve employee retention and even serve as a recruitment tool.

In general, what type of results could participants and companies see after using health coaching?

Quantifying the effectiveness of coaching goes beyond measuring improvements in biometric screening values. By intentionally broadening our data collection strategies, we provide a comprehensive view of the transformative power of coaching, highlighting the multifaceted aspects that contribute to a person's wellbeing.

Improving someone’s self-efficacy (I.e., their belief in themselves and their ability to accomplish things) will be the most important outcome of the program. It’s well documented that belief in ourselves and confidence in our abilities is crucial for making positive changes for our wellbeing. When self-efficacy is in place, sustainable health outcomes and a more engaged employee population naturally follow.

How does Health Coaching tie into other recent enhancements with Navigate's platform?

We see health coaching as a huge benefit that employers can bring to their people. This ties in perfectly with all our traditional product levels and programming options. Navigate is consistently moving towards a place of personalized wellbeing for everyone.

Just look at our recent enhancements like NavigateYOU, the findhelp integration, and our Total Health Platform. We believe features like these pair perfectly and create a 360-degree atmosphere of personalization.

Total Health is based on the same science-backed markers of wellbeing that define our coaching curriculum. Meaning if you were to utilize coaching as part of a Total Health program, you would be getting the best of both worlds. You could drive employees toward relevant employer resources with the Total Health survey and program. Using this data, you can empower health coaches to help them guide participants back to the most relevant resources. Plus, coaching sessions would be more efficient with coaches being able to see in-depth data about each person’s risks, needs, biometrics, behaviors, interests, and readiness to change.

We want to help you build an even healthier, happier workforce. Chat with one of our experts to find out how Navigate Health Coaching can benefit your population.