Creating a coaching culture that increased employment engagement at one of Australia’s largest membership organisations, by developing a number of customised coaching and feedback programs targeting different levels of leadership.

THE CLIENT

The client is an employer of choice and one of the most recognised brands in Western Australia. With approximately 1400 employees and a membership base of over 1 million people, they provide their members with services in the areas of motoring, insurance, travel and tourism.

THE CHALLENGE

The Organisational Development team were looking for a training partner to assist them in creating a culture of coaching and feedback to improve employee engagement and drive efficiency across all parts of the organisation.

As part of their numerous initiatives to increase employee engagement, prior to engaging our services they had successfully rolled out a program that equipped all employees with the foundation skills required to manage difficult conversations. They were therefore looking to build on the existing skills that had been practiced, while building new competence in areas of feedback and coaching to specifically develop the capability of people managers to engage their team members and to drive performance.

While the feedback from the difficult conversations program had been positive, they found that it was difficult for employees to remember all the steps of the process. Therefore, they wanted to ensure that concepts and tools introduced in the various feedback and coaching programs were readily understood, memorable and most importantly, easily applied in the workplace.

THE Solution

After a phase of diagnostics with key stakeholders, we designed 3 programs, including a comprehensive facilitation guides for each of the below:

  1. Mastering Feedback - delivered in either a 1 day or espresso sessions format, suitable for anyone with people management responsibilities

  2. Coaching for Results - a 2 day foundation program for front line leaders

  3. Advanced Coaching - a 1 day program for senior leaders

Once the specific programs were piloted by Shift, we then conducted Train the Trainer sessions with the organisation’s Organisational Development Consultants to up-skill them to deliver the sessions internally.

All programs were designed with the following aspects in mind:-

  • Built upon and leveraged existing concepts, rather than introduced new language and ideas unnecessarily.

  • Bespoke for the client e.g. A simple 3 step coaching model that reflected the name of the organisation was created, so that it was catchy and easy to remember.

  • Highly interactive and experiential in nature to give all participants ample time to practice skills introduced in the sessions.

  • Were formed around one key meta-model that encompassed all key skills and concepts.

  • Well structured so that learning was layered and participants were always aware of the reason behind what they were doing.

“Shift is the only firm I can trust to design and deliver training programs that are guaranteed to create observable behaviour changes in participants….they were able to create a simple, memorable and effective model of coaching that continues to be a fundamental methodology that is practiced across the organisation”

The result

All three programs have continued to form part of the core curriculum of leadership development in the organisation. Since the programs initial launches, the employee engagement scores have continued to improve and there is a common language used in regard to feedback and coaching. The Organisational Development team has observed that leaders at all levels can easily remember and apply the simple three step coaching model, something they have not found with other training interventions.

Due to the comprehensive facilitation guides, and simple and effective program structure, Organisational Development Consultants who are new to the business, have subsequently found it easy to pick up the programs and successfully deliver them with positive participant feedback. This organisation now has a solid set of programs to complement their core curriculum and has experienced an excellent return on their initial investment.

“Shift understands our business challenges well and ensure that program content in based on up to date research that is the communicated in a way that is relevant, simple, practical and engaging”

ORGANISATIONAL DEVELOPMENT LEAD