Creating a positive workplace
HR management and organisational psychology research has explored employee motivation and how to grow and retain your high potential talent pool. Coaching ranks highly as an effective tool both in terms of cost and time investment.
Why include coaching in your employee development programme?
Higher motivation, buy-in to achieve corporate goals.
Employee retention = reduce your hiring, on-boarding and employee development costs longer-term, avoid costly cycles of employees leaving in waves.
Retaining high-value employees
Research has shown that high potential employees leave when they are not fully satisfied. The dissatisfaction may not be linked to the job per se. It might be that a reduction in hours is required to look after family, more working from home, less working from home.
Employers fear to ask – “what would make a difference to you?” It feels sometimes to personal and too risky to ask this question but yet it can open up a dialogue ensuring the employee stays. A coach is often better placed to ask this question than the line manager.
Improving your employees' skills
On the other hand, research also shows that underperforming employees tend to stay – they do not know that something is not quite working. That something, however, can often be fixed if both parties are honest, provide helpful feedback and agree to work together on a solution with a realistic timeframe and review points.
Providing constructive feedback is an employer’s duty to ensure an employee can grow and develop. Not mentioning it and hoping the employee will leave is letting the employee down as development points are not addressed and the employee may not know what the employer thinks and what could be done different.
How can coaching further benefit your business?
The costs of hiring and onboarding and employee are a significant cost to most organisations. Retaining your employees is important to reap the benefits of the initial investment. A coaching approach to consider both career and performance development in the context of an employee’s changing life circumstances is an investment which is increasingly considered part of good HR and talent management practice.
In the best case, your high potential employees will stay, underperforming employees will feel more motivated as they feel cared for and work on improvement areas. In the worst case, underperforming employees tend to realise that there is a mismatch between their skill set and strengths and what is required or that their own value set is not in line with the corporate values and with that understanding they are in a position to find a new position without the employer having to spend time on time and cost-intensive performance management programmes or termination agreements.
MY approach
With an employee’s identify often being defined by their job, providing thinking time and space for reflection on the question – what is working, what needs improving and how go I about it, an integrated systematic career development and life coaching approach has been identified as one of the most cost-effective development tools.
I have experience in using personality assessment tools to identify how your employees want to be managed, how they interact with each other, how their strengths can best be utilised and what can cause tension and stress. Using 360 feedback approaches, input can be sought from colleagues and fed into the coaching process.
About Tina
I started my career at EY, one of the Big Four international accountancy and advisory firms, trained as a Chartered Accountant and worked in Tax Advisory before moving into finance and operational roles with start-ups and SMEs in and around Cambridge. My coaching focuses on professionals working in the advisory sector (accountancy, finance and other consulting/advisory roles ) as well as anyone working in or/and owning a small or medium-sized business.
So, if you want to be at the forefront of organisational management approaches, you may want to consider an integrated career development and life coaching approach as part of your employee talent development programme.