What is understood by career coaching?
Within Orange, coaching is used in various ways to support people on the job and within leadership and personal development. Within the last 8 months a new career coaching initiative has been launched.
The programme uses volunteer line managers that have been trained as “career coaches” to provide coaching to staff with whom they have no reporting relationship.
What are the overall objectives for coaching?
There are two main objectives for career coaching at Orange:
- As part of their overall talent management strategy, Orange wants to see employees take greater responsibility for their own careers. Within the performance management process, they encourage managers and employees to have a career development conversation but were concerned that many of these conversations were not taking place or were not effective enough. This was also a topic raised in the employee opinion survey. During focus groups convened to examine this issue, employees suggested they would like to talk to an “external” person rather than their line manager.
“We need more managers and employees to have this conversation”
- Orange is in a competitive market as far as skills and resources is concerned and this effort is intended to help with retention by engaging employees proactively in conversations about their careers before they look elsewhere. This contributes to their goal to be recognised as a Great Place To Work.
“It’s about making sure the right people are in the right jobs”
How is the program structured?
Career coaching has been offered to all staff, regardless of grade, since April 2007. The program consists of three sessions of one and a half hours each with a line manager coach trained specifically in career coaching.
Employees complete an online application, which must have their line manager’s approval, and commit to the time required for the coaching process over an 8 - 10 week period. Included on this form is the question “Why do you want to be coached?” with some examples of the reasons someone might choose.
Coaches and Coachees are matched primarily by location although grade or band is also taken into account to ensure there is not too big a disparity between levels.
The coaching process over the three sessions is fairly tightly structured with an anticipated outcome being that each coachee will develop career goals. These goals are then fed into the conversation the coachee has with their line manager at the next performance review. The coaches are encouraged to give their coachees exercises to work on between the meetings, drawn from a large selection offered by the talent management team.
“The first session was surprising and fulfilling, I have managed people for some time and held what I thought of as coaching style conversations, I hadn’t done it like that before”.
How are coaches developed?
Line managers who want to be a coach indicate their interest and are sent a pack of information to help them understand what is required and what career coaching means. If they apply, their application has to be signed-off by their line manager to ensure that the commitment of time required is agreed. They have a short interview to confirm they are suitable and commit to offering up to four hours of their time each month.
Coaches have no more than two coachees at any one time and are not compensated for this as “extra” work but fit this into the normal working day.
Training takes place during a two-day workshop run by the Business Coaching Foundation (BCF) and has been very well received. Many coaches come from a technical background and have found it particularly interesting and satisfying; a couple are now actively seeking roles as a coach full-time.
The training focuses on more theoretical principles on the first day, covering topics such as the difference between coaching and mentoring, the skills required and the model for coaching used by Orange and BCF (the STAR model; similar to the GROW model but using Situation, Tasks, Actions and Results). The second day is devoted to skills practice.
“The training was fantastic, I’ve done some other coaching training and this was much more focused”
“We talked about the basic behaviours of a coach and also how normal people deal with the cycle of life, how everyone faces situations where they don’t know what to do next. We learnt about asking the right questions to get to the root causes of the person’s problem, they don’t tend to realise what the underlying issue is. We learnt how it’s not right for the coach to suggest something, even if we know the answer. That way it becomes the coachee’s idea”
When they have finished the program, coaches are introduced to the network of other trained coaches and there is an expectation that they will arrange informal meetings with the other coaches in their location to discuss their experience in a peer-to-peer learning process.
How do Orange run their programme?
The program was launched internally through a variety of communications, including electronically, under the headline “Itchy feet or future thinking?” Staff were encouraged to express an interest electronically through the company intranet. To the surprise of the Talent Management team, 1200 staff replied with requests for more information, more than 10% of the employee population.
“The interest has been amazing”
When the program was launched, there were 12 trained coaches from the HR department. Eight months later, they have 70 coaches trained and 100 employees have already completed the 3-session coaching process.
How is coaching evaluated?
After the process is completed, the coachee is asked to complete an evaluation form describing their experience of the scheme, their coach’s style and the outcomes they’ve achieved.
Several people have also sent unsolicited messages after their first session commenting on how this one conversation has already had a significant impact on their feeling of motivation.
The head of career coaching calls the coach, both after their first session with each coachee to check how they feeling about the interaction, and after the process is complete, to gather feedback.
The talent management team keep a database of all the coaches and coachees and are tracking their progress, checking to see how many are retained and if so, their movements into new roles within the organisation.
The HR team are also hoping to see an improvement in the annual opinion survey results regarding scores for career development.
What results and impacts have they found?
Given the relatively recent start of this programme, the limited data gathered by the talent management team suggests that coaching has been very positively received.
The coaches and coachee involved in this research all feel very satisfied with the interactions, with expectations exceeded on both sides.
Coaches identified additional benefits for themselves personally as managers; feeling like their management style has improved as a result of learning the value of questioning in comparison to being directive.
“It’s frustrating as a manager, to not get information from someone, so before I would state what I thought, make suggestions. The course helps you learn skills. You can teach people to coach themselves. It’s all about not making the suggestion for them. I’m more patient now, I’m asking more questions.”