From Churn to Change: A Clean Coaching Approach to Sustainable Employment

A key principle within Clean Coaching is that the coach trusts the client to uncover their own understanding of what’s happening, what they’d like to have happen and what they’d like to do next. This is in contrast to the more directive approaches often used in the Welfare to Work sector, where there can be pressure on advisors to get people into jobs - any jobs - regardless of whether those jobs are suited to the individual’s skills, motivations or circumstances. The result is often ‘churn’: people take up work, only to leave again within weeks, returning to the system discouraged and frustrated - a massive waste of time, funds, goodwill and self-esteem.

Work Directions UK tried something different. Led by Thérèse Rein and Richard Johnson, a radical new idea was put into practice: what if employment advisors were trained not as enforcers, but as personal coaches? Built into their programme was the notion that job seekers were not broken but were, in fact, the best experts on their own next steps.

Their model aimed to develop sustainable employment - not just quick fixes. Clean Language played a key role in the training of the job coaches - helping them understand their own ways of thinking, organising and decision-making and, crucially, how different someone else’s system might be.

The coaches needed to be able to work effectively with a broad range of job seekers: professionals made redundant and facing age discrimination; young people working cash-in-hand while receiving benefits; parents and carers returning to the workforce after decades; people from a wide range of cultural, religious, racial, gender and sexual identities; and many neurodivergent individuals navigating systems that hadn’t been built with them in mind.

The advisors learned how to lean into one another when they had a job seeker on their books whose system was so divergent from theirs that they could not make sense of it. Within this organisation it was perfectly fine for a job coach to say to a colleague, “I’m finding it hard to connect with this client’s system - can I hand them over to you? Or could I shadow you? Or perhaps you could mentor me so I can learn how to better support someone like this in the future?”

Rather than labelling certain clients as “difficult,” the organisation began to treat difference as an opportunity for learning and collaboration. Diversity was not a problem to be solved, but a strength to be understood.

Even more powerfully, clients began learning clean questions themselves. As they discovered their own models for decision-making, motivation and change, they could advocate for what worked best for them—and sometimes even coach the coaches in return.

Before Work Directions took on their first contract, only 25% of job seekers found work—and just 40% of those were still in work six weeks later. One year after embedding Clean Coaching into their approach, 50% of job seekers were finding work—and 80% of them were still employed six weeks on.

That 80% figure told a different story. Not just about jobs, but about dignity, self-knowledge and mutual respect. It showed what’s possible when people are trusted, heard, and supported to move forward on their own terms—cleanly, clearly, and sustainably.