Every day, leaders around the world realize how coaching employees can have a positive effect on their organization. Open-minded managers are stopping use of “the boss” card and are starting to offer regular feedback and support to their employees. Not only does this approach improve collective performance, but it also improves employee retention. When working in a nurturing environment that promotes career development and growth, employees don’t want to leave the company.
How Coaching Improves Employee Retention
Can you create an unmatched employee experience through coaching? Can it really keep the turnover low?
Here’s how coaching improves employee retention:
- Set and Achieve Goals
- Build Accountability
- Give Feedback
- Improve Emotional Intelligence
- Provide Development Opportunities
Set and Achieve Goals
Goal setting is extremely important. Business goals often cover topics such as better company culture, improved diversity awareness, and increased employee engagement. However, businesses often don’t communicate these goals to employees the way they should.
Use coaching to open a channel of communication. Give your employee a chance to feel included in the organization. Once they understand organizational goals, employees are more willing to contribute to them.
Goals aren’t just for the organization. People are motivated by goals, too. Coaching provides a way to have your employees set their own goals and try to achieve them.
What’s more, this kind of individual goal completion benefits organizational objectives too. In most cases, the worker’s goals will align with that of the organization. When aligned, both the company culture and employee engagement flourish.
Build Accountability
To build trust in the workplace, you have to take responsibility for both yourself and your team.
In a workplace without accountability, nobody takes responsibility for anything. This, in turn, decreases employee engagement and brings the company’s growth to a grinding halt.
Through business coaching, an organization can establish an accountability culture that will keep everyone highly engaged.
Prevent accountability obstacles. Some of the most common ones include:
- Grudge collecting (“Senior leaders don’t really care about us”)
- Victim mentality (“This happened only because the team abandoned me on the project”)
- Learned helplessness (“Looks like I’m not smart enough to achieve this”)
In these situations, coaches/managers have to deal with problematic behavior by developing non-punitive strategies. These include listening and affirming employee concerns, redirecting workers toward problem-solving, as well as offering tips for more effective performance.
Give Feedback
When delivered well, giving and receiving feedback go a long way.
If you’re providing feedback to an employee, your goal should be to encourage their work development. When an employee is doing well in his or her duties, provide them with recognition. If they need improvement, on the other hand, be constructive.
Whenever managers provide feedback, employees feel that the company cares about their development and values their work. The result of this improves employee retention.
However, it’s not easy for the leaders to determine the best way to provide feedback. Be performance-focused, personalized, and specific. It allows employees and leaders to adequately give and receive feedback.
Improve Emotional Intelligence
Managers and employees interact with clients and with each other throughout the day.
For that matter, it’s highly important for them to identify the emotions of the individuals they’re interacting with. As it turns out, these emotions have a significant impact on employee engagement levels and, thus, on improving employee retention.
Coaching improves this by teaching employees and leaders adequate ways to understand nonverbal signs of communication. A coach can also teach how to ask adequate questions. With this knowledge, everyone becomes willing to learn about how a specific situation impacts the other person.
With improved emotional intelligence, everybody in the workplace becomes aware of how the people they talk to receive information. Coaching can fix communication problems in the workplace and improve employee retention.
Provide Development Opportunities
Employees wants an opportunity to develop their career. A company that doesn’t provide their workers with career development opportunities is likely to lose them.
Therefore, businesses should accommodate this demand. When given desired opportunities, employees are less likely to leave the organization, another step leading to improved employee retention.
Most coaching programs are a wonderful career development tool. What’s more, coaches are always willing to help with developmental issues, such as knowledge gaps or skill deficiencies.
Summary
A well-implemented coaching strategy, covering the steps mentioned above, can help workers see the bigger picture and stay engaged. It’s a proven method of retaining top talent and paving your company a path to success.
Jennifer Wilson is a writer at Qeedle.com She knows business processes and operations management inside out. As she understands all the challenges of running a small business firsthand, it’s her mission to tackle the topics that are most relevant to entrepreneurs and offer viable solutions.
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