Coaching: A Must-Have Strategy for Organizations Driving Employee Engagement

It is interesting how performance management systems have always been about ‘judging’ and ‘expecting conformation’. In today’s age, where people are moving towards spiritual awakening, towards fuller lives, towards a better work and life balance, employees are no longer willing to put up with such archaic systems. Flip the system to be an enabler and there seems to be no logical reason why employees would consider leaving.

Why do employees leave? There is always one answer to this question – the organization can no longer provide what the employee wants. This could be financial in nature, it could be based on one’s work or it could be driven by some other need. While coaching cannot help address all issues that drive employees to leave, coaching can be introduced at various junctures in an organization to engage employees and to pre-empt attrition.

• Integration Coaching for new joiners -Getting new hires to settle into their roles, integration coaching can even be extended to executives moving into new roles across functions within large organizations, in which case this could be construed as Role Transition Coaching

• Performance Coaching – Focusing this on consistent performers is perhaps the best bet as it is the consistent performers which form the backbone of an organization

• High Performance Coaching – Focusing this on consistent performers is perhaps the best bet as it is the consistent performers which form the backbone of an organization

• Coaching for High Performers – This could be offered as an incentive offered by organizations to its high performers and help them create and implement their overall development plans

• Life Transition Coaching – This could be very relevant to employees who have experienced a drastic transition in their lives on account of a personal loss or loss of position or are considering changing their careers or exiting

None of this is to be confused with counseling or mentoring, which is perhaps what many organizations are offering today. While counseling and mentoring are useful for resolving the issue which is immediate in nature, coaching helps plug the much talked about gap of employee engagement.

So what is employee engagement again? It is about engaging employees. While people can be engaged in groups for meeting common needs, no individual can be engaged without an individual focus. If you are an HR professional or a business leader, you are probably thinking – great but supervisors just don’t have the time!

Well – that’s what coaches are for! If organizations zero in on their disengaged employees, who have been in the organization for more than 3 years or those who are high performers or those who are clearly high potential employees and assign coaches to them, employee engagement stands to improve multifold. Most of these people are power centers in organizations and hence, focusing on them, would ensure that the others follow suit.

So – having read this, what do you think would be a good logical next step for you?