The workplace is changing faster than ever and employers need to adapt to evolving work styles, leadership styles, and diversity of thoughts and ideas.
Meanwhile, employees are integrating the latest technological innovations into their preferred working style to achieve an ideal “work-life blend.” Yet organizations continue to under optimize their most valuable asset — human capital. Practically every worker could be a little bit better and, if that happens, whole organizations rise. It’s the system dynamics of the workforce — invest in your people and you will achieve non-linear productivity.
Our belief in that idea is why we led the just announced $103 million Series C funding round for BetterUp, a now 195-person strong startup with the simple idea that all workers — not just executives — deserve personalized coaching to help them unlock their full potential and flourish first as people, and thus as workers, helping their workplaces in the process.
At Lightspeed, we focus on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the enterprise. BetterUp fits in that space and it’s why we also led BetterUp’s Series B round last year. BetterUp co-founders Alexi Robichaux and Eddie Medina pioneered the space of delivering mobile, personalized one-to-one coaching backed by scientific evidence and principles throughout a workforce. The vision was Alexi’s, who benefited himself from working with a coach through a life/career transition. Alexi, Eddie and the BetterUp team have since propelled that idea into a mission-driven company that’s delivering a solution that companies large and small have long missed.
The rapidly growing number of customers are experiencing the results — with BetterUp’s coaching, clients have seen results including a 26% jump in job performance, a 25% increase in focus, and a 15% reduction in burnout. Employee intent to stay with one organization increased by over 63% with BetterUp coaching.
That’s the kind of ROI that companies need to justify the more than $200 billion spent on learning and development every year — most of which is quickly forgotten because the one-size-fits-all delivery method isn’t personalized or people quickly revert back to their old ways of doing things. In contrast, BetterUp empowers people to work on exactly what they need to become better. That might be communication, handling conflict, becoming more assertive, or getting comfortable making sales pitches and speeches. By customizing coaching over time, sustainable behavior change takes hold and those people then model the desired behaviors for others, making everyone, including front-line managers, transformation agents for an entire organization.
BetterUp’s success is driven not only by its desire to unleash human potential — but in relating it to business outcomes. BetterUp now has more than 1,000 coaches worldwide to meet workers where they are, in their language. Last year, BetterUp expanded its leadership development platform and core one-to-one coaching with products to deliver coaching “On Demand,” 24/7, so people get help when they need it. Also, BetterUp expanded its bench to deliver an “Extended Network” of experts to help clients with issues such as nutrition, sleep hygiene, and even fear of public speaking. Research shows that all of these cost companies dearly, and I can personally relate to how much more effective I am as a result.
We know that BetterUp will continue to lead this space because of the investment it makes in doing it right. Anybody who’s ever tried to change a bad habit, or to even improve a good one, knows how hard it can be. BetterUp is investing in deep research into the inner lives of workers so it can better craft effective coaching techniques. BetterUp Labs, announced last year, will draw guidance from its Science Board and some of the best psychologists on the planet, including Adam Grant, best selling author and organizational psychologist, and Martin E.P. Seligman, the founder of positive psychology.
As BetterUp enables human flourishing, the end result will be even bigger. By transforming people, organizations change from the inside out vs. the top down approach that’s long been the standard. Helping employees cope and embrace change is a very coachable issue. BetterUp is all about the human, and delivering what they need — and want. Only then does real change take place.
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