Digital Coaching as a Key Lever for Amplifying Your Employee Experience

Shifting workplace dynamics and unprecedented world events have heightened the need for a transformational approach to work. An approach that highlights employee experience - enhancing all of the moments that matter so that organizations can attract, develop, and retain the best talent. This transformational approach means rethinking how we develop and invest in our people so that they can flourish. When our people thrive, our organizations thrive. High quality, scalable coaching as a benefit, is a key lever in creating irresistible employee experiences at work while fueling the digital transformations we are experiencing today and see on the horizon.

The dynamically changing employee-employer relationship

The intense focus on employee experience has become mainstream as a result of the constrained labor market and the continued growth in global employment  opportunities. With the pandemic prompting a renewed look at life, people are rethinking many aspects of their lives, including their employee experience and overall relationship to work. People are searching for a better match to suit their whole life needs.

People are asking themselves more questions about purpose, happiness, their values, and how the way they are spending their time helps to live those values and maximize their happiness or purpose. Likewise organizations are responding to the mass exodus of employees by reflecting on what they can do differently to create workspaces that are meaningful, more supportive, and inclusive for everyone. Companies are looking to make sweeping changes - from flexible working arrangements, overhauling talent processes, altering investments in employee benefits, to covering more learning and development and well-being supportive resources. Coaching is one of the most powerful interventions to support individual and organizational transformation. With streamlined capabilities to scale this intervention, coaching is no longer reserved for the few, but accessible to the many and being implemented by companies as a broader employee benefit.

The employer-employee relationship has been shifting for many years. With many of the societal impacts we’ve experienced globally the past two years, this relationship is shifting even more. We see trends such as:

• 59.9 % of Australian workers are considering a new role within the next 12 months. (Future Form Pulse, 2021)
• 69% of Singapore companies reported an increase in turnover compared to the same period in 2020 (Mercer, 2021)
• 88% of employees are now prioritizing work-life balance, mental health, and finding meaning over a steady paycheck (Oracle, 2021)
• Over 77% of voluntary turnover is preventable and includes push factors such as career development opportunities, work environment, management behavior, job characteristics, compensation and benefits, and work-life balance. (Workinstitute, 2019)

However the issues of employee turnover, employee engagement, retention, and attraction are not new issues to tackle in the workplace. Whether we looked at the employee-employer relationship 30 years ago, 10 years or, today, this relationship has been under pressure since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The pandemic has certainly highlighted these issues, accelerated many shifts in the workforce and in the employee - employer  contract. So why are more people leaving in droves...now?

Great Resignation or Great Disconnect?

There are continuing disconnects between what employees want and need and what employers ‘think’ people want and need. This chasm has been fairly consistent over the past few decades. In 2006, the Corporate Leadership Council found that in many instances HR leaders overestimated the importance of ‘soft’ attributes (e.g., communication and manager capability) over ‘hard’ factors (e.g., rewards and benefits) to their overall experience. McKinsey’s (2021) research on why employees leave their organizations shows very similar patterns.

While there is some overlap between the employee and employer perspective, employees indicated that primary reasons for their departures are relational in nature - needing a sense of belonging, feeling valued by their organization and manager, having flexibility in their work, potential for advancement, etc. Whereas, employers think the primary reasons include more transactional attributes such as inadequate compensation and looking for better jobs.

A key takeaway from this alone, is that there is a much greater need to focus on all of the aspects of people’s experience.  Yes, we need good processes and foundational elements of the work environment that meet people’s needs (e.g., sufficient and competitive compensation, ease of accessing technology, support for health and well-being), we also need to think about the everyday emotional and relational needs and the opportunities for people to flourish. This is what the employee experience is all about.

Building an organization and the support systems around these needs is essential. In fact as organizations strive to be best-in-class workplaces where people thrive, they are in search of being irresistible.  Bersin’s (2021) depiction of the irresistible organization is foundationally built around these human needs, and much more.

The key question is how can we create the most irresistible experiences  that unleash the human potential in every individual at all the moments that matter? Imagine if we had more tools to leverage that can better support our human needs and help us thrive? And, what if some of these tools came from the place where we spend the most time - work?

Digital Coaching to Support Employee Experiences

Coaching can now be delivered in a more scalable fashion, with benefits such as reduced overhead and administrative costs, simplified coach contracting, and increased access to a global pool of coaching experts. Therefore, we can provide one of the most effective interventions that focuses on unlocking people’s potential at every moment in their experiences with us.  Digital coaching provides an opportunity to proactively invest in employees, mitigating issues of churn. It’s an opportunity to use coaching more as a supportive employee benefit, part of the overarching experience, and an investment in all - rather than a luxury for only the select few.

Digital coaching can help all employees understand and cultivate a strong sense of purpose and meaning, clarify professional and life goals, build skills that bolster not only managers but growth in multiple career paths, help cultivate the behaviors that underpin an inclusive and positive workplace, and so much more.

Considering how digital coaching can be a key lever in creating irresistible employee experiences, it opens the door to thinking about how this impactful intervention can be a benefit throughout an employee’s journey. The possibilities are nearly endless.

Conclusions

It’s time to transform employee experiences. Mozart once said that “music is not in the notes, but in the silence between”. Employee experience is just like this - there are major notes, the pivotal moments that matter like onboarding, and there’s the space between the notes, where experience really comes to life, such as leading an employee resource group. We have an opportunity to influence the entire spectrum of experience. The moments in between the notes, where a large part of the soundtrack of our daily experiences exists, can be transformed as well, with the right support. Digital coaching can be the essential lever that brings that experiential soundtrack to life - helping employees to thrive and your organizations to flourish.