Primeast

Client

Major petrochemicals company with European Business Centres

Project

Creating an encouraging culture to manage expectations and improve employee retention

Results

Employee attrition dropped by more than 10%

Business, Background & Objectives

The Support Centre for this major international petrochemicals company had opened three years before with a global remit for many of its functions. New recruits were multi-lingual graduates with high expectations. The organisation is process oriented and has many controls to ensure that processes work effectively. As a result, even though promotion opportunities do exist there had been a high rate of attrition as a result of perceived expectations not being met amongst its 1200 staff.

The challenge was to create a more open, inclusive and encouraging culture as a means of managing expectations and improving employee retention.

Our role

Our brief was to lower the attrition rate amongst staff in a Business Support Centre of a global business. We were asked to help managers develop coaching skills as a means of encouraging dialogue as an alternative to a “command and control” style. The programme developed and rolled out has been a mixture of coaching skills workshops and 1:1 coaching experience over a period of two years. It has worked as follows:

• The senior manager was coached for three occasions to kick the programme off. He continues to be coached and has subsequently been involved in coaching others
• A two day coaching skills workshop was run for him and his immediate team
• His management team had a 1:1 coaching session before coaching anyone else
• The next management tier attended a coaching skills workshop
• They received a 1:1 coaching session before coaching anyone else
• On a quarterly basis from then on, two day interventions have been run to support the coaching approach in the following ways:
  • 1:1 coaching for managers or supervisors
  • Observation and feedback for managers or supervisors coaching someone. Feedback has been with both people together so that both learn from the experience.

Results

To date employee attrition has dropped by more than 10%. Coaching is part of the way of managing for most managers and supervisors. Employee satisfaction ratings have improved and morale in the Centre is much improved. Our consultant has been asked to roll out the programme to another division within the centre.

In the video below, Primeast Chairman John Campbell discusses introducing a coaching culture, and some of the benefits this could have for your organisation.

To discuss your coaching issues and how we may be able to help, call Primeast’s Head of Coaching Warwick Abbott at our UK offices (+44 (0) 1423 531 083), or email him directly.