In a country where unemployment is below 4 per cent and in a sector facing intense competition for staff, financial services company Irish Life & Permanent is turning to coaching to help it attract and retain staff
Working life in the Irish Republic’s financial sector is now as highly pressured as it is in the UK. Staff turnover is on the rise, with Ireland’s young people increasingly seeking to change jobs every two or so years and take sabbaticals abroad.
Coaching programme
Aim: to build an internal coaching team; to offer more development options within a flatter structure; to encourage employees to take more ownership of self-development; and to address recruitment and retention problems common to the sector.
Format: voluntary two-day courses for middle managers and line managers in coaching.
Provider: The Executive Coach consultancy.
Cost of developing pilot: €100,000.
Key achievements: employees are beginning to see coaching as benefiting everyone rather than used merely to address problems.
Staff turnover at Irish Life & Permanent is running at more than 25 per cent in its call centres and between 10 and 20 per cent in other areas. While high turnover benefits the firm in some cases – as it is restructuring the business following merger and acquisition activity – it is a big problem in others. When the company carried out a staff review two and a half years ago, it identified coaching as one way of making the firm more attractive to staff – and therefore more competitive.
Niall Saul, group head of HR and organisation development at the Dublin-based company, says: “Some of this high turnover suits us quite well, but in other areas it doesn’t. The challenge is for us to ensure that in key areas, where skill replacement is expensive, we have robust retention strategies embedded in that business area to minimise our exposure.”
The staff review revealed that managers’ intense focus on commercial targets in such a competitive environment meant they were overlooking the career needs of staff, adds Saul. This was reinforced by employee feedback.
“We wanted to alter the balance between business targets and staff development. There was also a demand from staff themselves, which showed up in our focus groups and climate surveys. We see coaching as another tool in our portfolio of development initiatives,” he says.
One of the problems is that, having made its organisational structure flatter, the company is unable to offer as many opportunities for promotion to management roles. More staff therefore want to look at their career development in broader terms, exploring the opportunities on offer across the organisation rather than higher up the corporate ladder.
The company identified a need for a cultural change which would foster the career development of staff. “We wanted to develop managers as coaches using the ‘Grow’ model (goal, reality, options, will), getting each person to assess where they are, what they want to do, the reality of the situation, where opportunities are, and to plan how to do it,” says Saul.
With this in mind, Irish Life brought in The Executive Coach consultancy to develop a pilot line-management coaching scheme, with senior managers acting as mentors. The aim is not to address particular problems but to help employees at all levels to improve their overall performance, building coaching into the performance management process.
Subsidiary Irish Life (Retail), which employs 1,200 people, was chosen to pilot the scheme, which may be extended across the organisation. Already some 150 people are taking part, and it is hoped that by the end of August, 250 coaching relationships will be under way.
“We decided to do this as a pilot in this part of the business because senior people were behind it,” says Saul. “We also felt that other staff were ready for this, judging from the result of climate surveys.”
Prior to developing the pilot, The Executive Coach was already running one-to-one coaching sessions for high-potential staff needing to work on specific skills. “This approach works well because it targets the areas that need to be addressed. It also uses an 18-point ‘challenges of leadership tool’, which is very effective,” says Saul.
Working with The Executive Coach, the company developed a model providing coaching training to 60 line managers and 14 senior managers – including members of the top team – who were to act as mentors. The pilot had two strands: basic training in coaching for line managers and more intensive training for senior staff. The training period lasted from March 2004 until the end of the year.
Saul says one of the key ingredients in the pilot approach was its voluntary nature: “The fact that the pilot is non-threatening gives us the best chance of getting a good level of utilisation. This process of benign osmosis is succeeding in getting a good level of traction, and people are generally happy to provide views on the experience in our focus groups because they see themselves as players in a genuine experiment in learning.”
Trevor Waldock, managing director of The Executive Coach, says spaces on the two-day training courses for middle managers were filled instantly.
“There was no need for coercion – word got round and there was a feeling that people wanted to be involved,” he says, adding that commitment from senior staff was crucial if the culture of the organisation was to be changed. “They had very high buy-in and influenced people across the organisation. At the most senior level, directors were offering themselves to become coaching ‘guineapigs’, which was a great endorsement.”
The long-term aim of the new twin-track approach was to promote coaching as a vehicle for “creating adult conversations around performance”, says Waldock. “An adult conversation is one in which both sides are speaking on equal terms,” he says. “A parental conversation is one in which the senior person is saying: ‘I am right and you are wrong – let me tell you all I know.’”
Waldock and his colleagues suggested a consultative, listening approach, taking into account both the experience of the person being coached and any actions taken so far. “If you meet someone in the corridor, this means saying: ‘What do you think should be done? What did you do? Sounds good to me,’” says Waldock. “The goal is to think about adding value and not having a closed mind about what should be done.”
Active listening is vital, believes Waldock. “We believe that most performance issues can be resolved if you get inside someone’s mindset,” he says. “Very few people are deliberately doing things in the wrong way, and with active listening you can find out what’s motivating them.”
Although the pilot is still at an early stage, Saul says the signs are promising. “The aim is to get people to take responsibility for their own career development, rather than for us to tell them. The aim to change culture is long term, and we have not set specific deadlines.
“We may look at taking this to another part of the group in one or two years’ time – we have already had one of the CEOs from another part of the business expressing an interest because of what he has heard anecdotally.”
One example of how the culture of the company is changing is that coaching is beginning to be seen as something that can benefit everyone, rather than merely a way of fixing a particular problem or honing a particular skill.
“People rate people they are coaching as good, medium and less good. Now we are saying: let’s work with all three groups. This is about getting everyone in the organisation to up their performance a notch – which is bound to have a positive effect on the performance of the organisation as a whole.”
The confidence – or otherwise – of line managers makes all the difference to the success of the pilot. Taking a gradual approach should help those who are struggling with the new approach to find their feet, says Saul. “For the next three or four months, we are offering to take managers through the process of coaching three team members, one at each level, so that we can work with them and help with any issues that arise. It’s not a ‘big bang’ approach – it’s very low threat to both managers and employees.”
Putting in enough time to develop skills and confidence is also a must. Saul says that staff time has been the main financial cost – but stresses that organisations do need to make this investment. He says getting line managers to find time is still an issue.
Saul says he has not experienced any difficulty in convincing senior staff that coaching can benefit the business. “As we have virtually full employment in Ireland, the issue is that we have to be the employer of choice. Retention is a big issue in this industry, and people leave managers; they seldom leave companies. Managers have seen the impact of a high level of turnover among staff: this is a very technical area, and training new recruits is expensive.”
The telling time for Irish Life will be at the end of the year, admits Saul. “Then we will see whether retention rates have improved,” he points out. “If there is significant change, then of course we won’t know if the coaching programme is the sole factor, but that’s better for us because it makes it harder for competitors to replicate what we are doing.”
Now the aim is to embed the new approach into the culture of the organisation in an organic, meaningful way. “Over the next two years, clearly we will be looking at what works and what doesn’t,” he says. “Some time over the next two years, we will get other companies in the group on to the scheme. My belief is that it will speak for itself.”
As for lessons learnt and advice to pass on, Saul says the attitude of the project team is essential. “The more engaged the team, the better they will be at identifying needs,” he says. “Our HR and line people have shown real commitment to this, and a real willingness to learn.”
Employer profile
Irish Life & Permanent employs 4,500 staff. Subsidiaries include retail bank permanent tsb and Irish Life (Retail), which employs 1,200 staff and is piloting the new coaching approach. It has a high-pressure working environment and a flattened organizational structure coaching programme.
Learning points
How to embed coaching into your company’s culture:
• Be flexible. Ensure the HR team initiating the scheme understands the benefits of coaching.
• Spread the load. Make sure there is more than one person in the organisation to champion the
scheme. The relationship between Irish Life & Permanent and The Executive Coach was built on a
number of relationships, not just one.
• Develop a collaborative strategy. Both client and provider have relevant knowledge, so make sure
you are using your shared experience. A one-sided, one-size-fits-all approach brought in by the
provider is less likely to succeed.
• Get senior-level support. Senior managers, directors and other high-level staff should be involved in
coaching themselves – using them as coaching “guinea pigs” is one way of letting them see how
the process can work.
• Take your time. Setting tight deadlines can be unrealistic. The process needs to be monitored and
assessed, but it is more likely to be accepted as part of company culture if staff at all levels are
familiar with the idea and are actively interested in taking part.