What Is Working Environment & Why Is It So Important?
By Kim Pedersen (Guest Blogger)

Kim Pedersen is an expert in Japan business and global working environments and the founder of Roukan.com (Roukan.jp localized for the Japanese market) as well as a member of the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance's advisory board.  

Why Is Working Environment (WE) So Important?
Well, the simple answer to this question is that it has a huge impact on a company’s profits. If a profitable organization is important to you then you should pay careful attention to your company's WE. This is just one of the reasons why WE is so important.

Another reason for its importance is that it influences an employee’s well-being to a very high degree. From a corporate standpoint, depending on how you understand and manage WE you can either increase the profitability and competitiveness of your company or you can risk being potentially sued and/or losing money through lack of employee engagement and reduced productivity, absenteeism and so on.

The funny thing about WE is that depending on which path you choose you will either receive all of the positive effects or all of the negative effects. There seems to be no middle ground in regards to WE. In practice, this means that you can choose to have very satisfied employees, a good working environment and higher productivity and profits or you can choose to have very unsatisfied employees, a bad working environment and the chance of litigation and resultant lower profits. 

So what is your choice going to be? 

Today’s author is Hank Chin who is an Expert Personal Branding and Career Consultant at IPIB and Director of the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance.

Hank is the No.1 certified job campaigner and personal branding strategist in the Chinese-speaking world, having earned 5 career-related credentials and prides himself on high customer satisfaction.

Change From Inside
As the No.1 certified résumé writer in the Chinese-speaking world, I pride myself on crafting my clients’ résumés and sharing tips on how they can use them more effectively.

The use of a professional résumé has definitely helped them land the interviews of their choice.

However, if they truly want to advance their careers, they will soon find that they need more than just a résumé, because resumes are always just a tool for landing an interview.

Recruiters Hire People, Not Resumes.
So if IPIB really wants to effectively be the clients’ strategic partner and help them land their job of choice and even develop their careers, we should be working with them from the inside out ─ on concepts and mindsets─and then we should be complementing these intangibles with professional marketing documents.

It means we should be reshaping their mindsets, planting the seed of personal branding, and motivating them to achieve their goals.

That is why I decided to be a coach.

What I Do
I learnt my coaching skills and knowledge from mentoring by some global senior coaches as well as through my work experience and formal study.

Before accepting a coaching client, I first try to determine if my clients are coachable and ensure that we have enough mutual trust.

Mutual trust is critical. Since coaching is purely person-to-person work, mutual trust is critical to whether or not we have a strong foundation and it is decisive make sure we have a successful coaching outcome.

If either the client or I don’t have one or both of these, then the coaching process will be less effective, perhaps even breaking the coach’s (my) reputation. So knowing your clients in advance is very important.

What I Like About Coaching
I really enjoy the feeling of hearing clients say they got invited to interviews and especially that they landed a job after receiving coaching training and the creation of a professional résumé.

It’s a BIG sense of accomplishment!

My passion is to help people in Asia fulfill their potential in their daily work.

As Steve Jobs said,“Great work comes from people loving what they do.”So if I can help more people do what they enjoy, their chances of creating great work will increase.

And then their passion and work will benefit their families, communities, countries, eventually all of Asia. Asia will thus grow organically, leading to more opportunities for her people.

My Beliefs
Living a successful and meaningful life that you define for yourself is not that hard, but it’s not that easy either.

A great coach will stand by you, inspire you, and motivate you, but in the end, you still have to ACT for yourself. You can achieve whatever you want as long as you start taking your first step, which will lead you to your future success in the end. 

Learn more about Hank Chin

Whenever we've asked coaches and prospective coaches about the greatest difficulties they encountered in either developing and running a full-time coaching practice or simple breaking into the field, we've noticed the same themes appear again and again. 

1. For Prospective Coaches Considering The Field

• What does a coach do?
  
• How do I become a coach?
  
• What are the first steps I should take to become a coach?
  
• What should I expect and do immediately upon becoming a coach?
  

2. For Newly Minted Coaches or Part-time Coaches Transitioning To A Full-time Coaching Career

• How do I shift from being a part-time or weekend coach to making this a full-time career? 
  
• What are the obstacles and opportunities I will face?
  
• What are the principal threats and risks I will face?
  
• How do I maximize my upside while mitigating or eliminating the downside risk?
  

3. For Coaches (Established or Newly Minted) Looking To More Efficiently & Effectively Sign Clients

• Given the very competitive market for coaches how do I quickly and effectively sign new clients?
  
• How do I differentiate my services?
  
• How do I improve my marketing efforts and results (on a small or non-existent budget)?
  
• How can I drive more business from inbound marketing efforts?
  
• How can I retain exist clients longer?
  
• How can I leverage existing or former clients for referrals?
  
• How can I re-market to or reactivate former clients? 
  

4. For Coaches Who Understand The Critical Importance of Staying Skilled-up & Relevant

• Clients are expecting a new level of coaching expertise and experience, how can I deliver?
  
• The coaching field is getting crowded, what skills can I develop to differentiate myself?
  
• How can I meet and manage client expectations?
• How do I best keep my skills sharp, up to date and utilize them as a competitive advantage?

As we move forward, our High-Impact Training & Certification programs will address all of these common themes and issues.  Throughout the training our objective remains the same:

To help you become a more effective and productive coach, not only in terms of the results you produce with clients but also the ease with which you attract and bring in new clients while retaining your current clients.

We would like to welcome Hank Chin as a Director of our organization.

Hank is the No.1 certified job campaigner and personal branding strategist in the Chinese-speaking world, has earned 5 career-related credentials and prides himself on high customer satisfaction.

Using achievable methods, he assists small- and mid-sized business owners in constructing their personal brands, fulfilling their career goals and broadening their business opportunities with a clear “who-I-am”.

In 2013, Hank authored the No.1 LinkedIn book in the Chinese-speaking world, guiding people how to connect with more international talent and opportunities as they further their career goals in a digital way. He takes pride in doing his best to help each professional have a wonderful career and realize their dreams.

We'd like to talk a little about our immediate plans for the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance in 2013 and then our plans beyond that.

The first order of business is to reach out to clients in Asia-Pacific and around the world to let them know about our organization and the unique benefits we provide while we build our membership rolls.

Beyond that, we will continue to build and offer original content and offer insights and analysis into coaching techniques and knowledge, client management and best practices.

We hope you'll join us on this journey!

We would like to welcome Kim Pedersen to our Advisory Board.

Kim is an expert on international work environments and work environment studies and analysis.
He is a multicultural person with extensive experience living, working and doing business in and with Japan over the last 40 years. 

As a native Danish and Japanese speaker as well as possessing fluent English he also holds an export and marketing degree from the Danish Export Institute.

Kim has been working under both Japanese and Danish working environment (WE) at several different levels ranging from being employed as a commercial attaché at the Royal Danish Embassy, being a manager in a Japanese company as well as running his own businesses in Japan and Denmark.

Kim is also the founder of the global Work Environment improvement company Roukan which can be found at roukan.com (and roukan.jp for the Japanese version)

Roukan.com is based solely on employee input making possible for employees to give their honest opinion and feelings. 

We are pleased to announce that the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance's entire content and content archives are now fully indexed & searchable!

This will give our member's easier and more complete access to all the organizations content.

We would like to welcome John Taylor to our Advisory board.

John serves as the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance's online marketing and advertising advisor charged with promoting the organization and website while building web traffic and share of mind. John is a seasoned sales executive and consultant with experience in the US, Japan and Australia. He's an expert in online media and traffic analysis and previously worked as a senior manager at a major online market intelligence and insight software firm where he developed partnerships with some of the most heavily trafficked sites including MegaUpLoad, online gaming sites and well as dozens of other high profile and highly trafficked sites.

He currently works for a major Silicon Valley enterprise software company and is the founder of the Wider Sales Funnel, the premier platform for accelerating your business performance.

John is a native speaker of English as well as a native speaker of Spanish and currently resides in Sydney, Australia and previously resided in the US (California, Boston and Florida) and Tokyo, Japan.

Greetings! And welcome to the Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance.

The Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance (APCA) is exclusively focused on serving the unique needs of the dynamic and fast-growing  Asia-Pacific market as an educational, professional networking organization and knowledge base.  

We cover the entire region from Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, India, Australia, New Zealand and Vietnam to Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and beyond by providing high-impact and ethically-grounded solutions for coaches of all disciplines: career, personal, life, executive, business, conflict resolution, personal relationships and performance coaches.

APCA is both industry-segment and industry-vertical agnostic, covering industries and verticals such as information technology, semiconductors, industrial, automotive, life science, pharma, fashion, consumer/FMCG, banking & finance, professional services as well as educational services, NGO's and government institutions through out the entire Asian region.

Woven throughout the organization are the core principles of ethical coaching.

Our organization's mission rests on three pillars: 

A. Educate
B. Connect
C. Protect

That's it. It's really that simple. 

We welcome you to join our organization and sign up for our newsletters.

James Santagata
Executive Director
The Asia-Pacific Coaching Alliance
Coach For Impact!