If you're a manager, HR or executive, you're probably spending time you don't have looking for new recruits in a managerial market that has become competitive once again. Faced with new generations of professionals who are more aware of the impact of their role at work, and more broadly in society, building motivated and committed teams who see an interest other than a financial one in doing their job well is often a challenge.
In this article, I examine the transformative effects of 1-on-1 coaching on retaining talent, by fostering a culture of continuous professional development.
Contents
- Retaining talent: a challenge in an age of constant change
- The 7 benefits of individual coaching for talent retention
- The 3 limits of individual coaching in talent retention
Retaining talent: a challenge in an age of constant change
You already know that your team members won't stay with the company until they retire - and neither will you! The notion of "loyalty" has changed profoundly. Spending your entire career with a single company for decades has long since ceased to be the model. Leaving a company after two or three years is commonplace, a sign that the relationship between the company and its employees is no longer so rigid.
Why competent employees leave their company
Most of us are prepared to put up with uncomfortable or even difficult working conditions for several weeks or months at a time. But we all have our limits. When a job is no longer bearable, it's often for one of these reasons:
- Pay that is too low for the amount of work required. Even if many of us would choose more flexibility in the way we organise our work rather than better pay, given the choice...
- Limited career development opportunities. Even if the most competent employees know that they won't all become VPs or CEOs, they need to be reassured that their efforts will bear fruit. If they feel they have reached a dead end, without development opportunities they'll look elsewhere.
- Too great a gap between rhetoric and day-to-day reality. The values advocated externally are not always really applied internally, which creates a feeling of disenchantment with the corporate culture. For example, how can we advocate innovation when flexibility is drastically limited? How can you encourage creativity when recruitment is not open to atypical profiles?
While many companies focus on improving transactional elements to improve team retention, with bonuses or various material benefits, their effectiveness is limited. In my coaching practice, I much more often hear executives prioritise more intangible and relational elements in their decision to stay with their company, which are more difficult to take into account in a simple retention rate. They talk about feeling involved in the company project, having the feeling of belonging to a group, feeling valued, perceiving consistency between the values promoted and their implementation. Without these elements, the risk for their company is not only of no longer being able to attract new talent, but also of seeing (too many) good employees jump ship, and the current situation worsen.
The cascading effects of high staff turnover
Recruiting and training new teams will cost you more in time and money than retaining them for several years.
A high turnover rate can also become a vicious circle when it comes to recruiting, as you will have difficulty attracting candidates. And this will have an impact on the quality of recruitment, and therefore the long-term performance and competitiveness of the company.
The challenges of developing talent
Whether you are a manager, HR or executive, you face many career management challenges:
- You need help to 'change the conversation', and move it away from hierarchical promotion and financial benefits towards professional development initiatives in the broadest sense.
- You need help to create a corporate culture that supports career paths with diverse professional experience.
- You need help to better reward the cases where employees (and their work potential) who are on the point of leaving are eventually retained to stay with the company, within their original teams or in another team.
The question remains: how do you retain the best staff when economic competition is fierce and organisational changes are frequent?
The 7 benefits of individual coaching for talent retention
The members of your teams need to know whether they are in a position to develop their transferable skills. And to do that, they need to have frequent career discussions with you, and to feel that they have the opportunity to explore the development opportunities available to them internally.
By including coaching as part of talent development plans, you're putting the odds in your favour to retain their valuable teams and reinforce their stability in the medium term... while improving their performance and efficiency, as well as the overall balance between their professional and private lives.
1. Offering constructive feedback in real time
Coaching in the workplace offers an outside view of day-to-day business issues and the various stakeholders involved. For generations looking for rapide, even instant, feedbackon their know-how and interpersonal skills, it's a reactive tool to help talented people get to know each other better and quickly become multi-skilled.
2. Encouraging personalisation to achieve individual objectives
In reality, every career goal is highly personal. Two people in the same job will probably have a different vision of what they want to achieve in three or five years' time. Similarly, they will have a different vision of the career development they want. They need personalised support to make the most of their skills, to identify what motivates them, what obstacles they face and what the company can do to help them beyond the usual definition of objectives. Individual coaching provides this kind of personalised support, tailored to the strengths and aspirations of each individual. This is all the more important for the brightest employees: they won't be satisfied with 'ready-made' learning opportunities! This was the case, for example, with Rebecca, considered to be a "rising star" in a major technology company. Thanks to individual coaching sessions, in which she put herself in situations, she identified development opportunities that enabled her to improve her management style and leadership posture. Her renewed confidence in her teams has inspired them to improve their professional performance.
3. Calming relationships
Individual coaching also helps to address interpersonal issues such as feeling neglected or under-appreciated, by working on emotional intelligence. Addressing conflict,calming relations or overcoming a fractured relationship obviously has many benefits for the company. Conflicts in the workplace can be a major source of stress and frustration, and lead to an increase in staff departures.
4. Exploring alternatives to leaving
This includes thinking outside the box, with a new project or with a new team that is being set up... Individual coaching can explore different options that have not been considered before, or, if justified, draw up an action plan for a work reorganisation proposal. Even small, subtle changes can make a big difference to someone who is considering leaving.
Whereas the question used to be "how do I keep this person in my team?", it would be interesting to ask "how do I keep this person in my company? Support for a talent's career needs to broaden to help them explore opportunities beyond the confines of their current situation.
5. Cultivating ties and commitment
An effective talent retention strategy goes beyond monetary incentives. It relies on the development of meaningful links between employees and all of their company's stakeholders. By offering a coaching experience as an integral part of a development programme, you can demonstrate the company's level of commitment to supporting their professional well-being. This was the case for Nicolas, a talented sales executive who was about to leave his job exhausted and on the verge of burnout. With coaching focused on his life balance and his understanding of priorities, he avoided a prolonged work stoppage and found a better professional position.
What's more, simply being selected for coaching can make you feel valued, worthy of the investment and an integral part of a company's long-term plans.
6. Developing everyone's skills
Individual coaching gives employees the tools and strategies they need to continue learning and improve their professional practices. Let's take the example of Nicole, a well-known project manager who had difficulty managing her time. During her coaching, she learned to prioritise her tasks more effectively, streamline processes and build on her strengths to achieve exceptional results. The direct impact of her practical exercises: within 6 months of her coaching, she had exceeded her performance targets.
7. Cultivating loyalty by investing in medium-term work success
The challenges of hybrid working and the 'war' to attract the best talent are just some of the complex issues you face today. Individual coaching fosters a sense of belonging, beyond the financial rewards, because it demonstrates a genuine investment in the personal and professional development of employees. For example, this is how David, an experienced HR professional who was considering a career change, rediscovered his passion for his work. He gained the confidence to seize new opportunities within the company.
Benefits for every moment
Depending on when individual coaching is initiated, it will bring different benefits:
- When used as a preventive measure, individual coaching can help employees to remain committed and effective in their overall performance, and avoid professional dynamics that have a negative impact on their personal well-being.
- When used in a high-risk context, a competent professional coach provides tools to help a manager get back on track before quietly resigning.
The 3 limits of individual coaching in talent retention
As a coach but not a fanatic, here are a few potential reasons why coaching in the workplace is a limited retention tool. While individual coaching can be a powerful tool for talent management, with a positive impact on collective emotional intelligence, it is essential to recognise its limitations and to consider other avenues that are more in line with the organisation's strategic objectives and constraints.
- Cultural incompatibility: The success of individual coaching depends on a supportive corporate culture that values growth and development. In cultures where coaching is stigmatised or undervalued, its effect on retention strategy will be limited, whatever action plan is put in place following coaching.
- Individual coaching is intrinsically tailored to the needs of each person, which makes it difficult to implement effectively in organisations with overly standardised 'resource management' processes and expectations.
- Resistance to change : Some people may resist the idea of coaching, seeing it as intrusive or unnecessary. Overcoming this resistance at an individual level requires a cultural change and buy-in from teams and management. Sometimes, setting up mentoring programmes can be a useful intermediate step.
In conclusion
Re-imagining talent retention is not a quick answer to the challenge you may be facing. But the sooner you start, the sooner your teams will see the benefits of staying rather than looking to move to another company to continue their professional development.
In this sense, retaining talent starts (almost) before recruiting it. After all, why try to recruit new staff if the company is not thinking upstream about how to develop new skills and encourage their development in the medium term? The important thing, then, is not so much to try to "retain human capital" as to put in place actions that will encourage each individual to develop professionally.
Don't forget that investing in individual coaching is not just an expense: it's an investment in the success and longevity of your company and your employer brand, with talented people being offered a solution to help them regain motivation, acquire new skills, give meaning back to their work and, of course, feel valued.
