Why Best Companies Provide Career Coaching as an Employee Benefit
Why are some of the Best Companies Hiring Career Coaches in 2024?
By Alice Rush, MA, CCC | May 15, 2024
Why is Career Coaching in such high demand for some of the best companies and organizations lately? I’ve been a career coaching and Employee Relations Consultant to Fortune 500 companies, healthcare, Tech, Govt., for over 25+ years and I’ve witnessed an evolution of reasons why some of the best places to work offer career coaching to their employees, yet in 2024 there are a myriad of new reasons why this is such a crucial employee benefit to help grow the bottom line.
Why did we hire career coaches in the past?
During the 1990’s, change was rampant, gone were the days of the IBM Gold Watch and Quarter Century Club honoring 25 years of service with one company. We were faced with abrupt changes because of downsizing, outsourcing, rightsizing, R & D was moved overseas; we had massive lay-offs, we needed coaches to help us take stock of ourselves and understand how our transferable skills fit into other aspects of the company- otherwise we were expendable. Third party Career Coaches were hired to help large populations of employees navigate their careers in times of change; specifically assessing their transferable talents that were needed in other areas of the company, while some departments were outsourced. Companies with these third -party career coaches; served by the Career Action Center in Palo Alto for example; were able to reduce hundreds of thousands of dollars in severance costs and costs associated with losing intellectual property by helping employees find other positions that were a good fit inside their organizations rather than laying them off. This allowed Fortune 500 companies the ability to retain their human capital and save on costly severance packages.
How did they do it? First, Career Coaches specifically assisted with educating employees on the paradigm shift from ‘entitlement’ to one of “you own your own employability”. We worked on building career-self-reliance within each employee. This was called “In-Placement” at the time, not Outplacement (see Harvard Business Review article, “Why Not IN placement,”1992. Employees could stay with the company if their skills were aligned, then severance was saved, morale was positive. Individual Career Assessments and road mapping was the foundation for developing career self -reliance.
Why Career Coaching in 2024 as a Wellness Benefit?
Today as a society we have a new set of reasons to offer career coaching as an employee benefit. The Top Reported Pain Points in a Google Search today in 2024 for HR executives indicates leadership development is an area of great need. Managers’ report having a hard time managing Millennials, Gen X, Y And Z and needing leadership development services to help them. Coaching helps in this process of building multi-generational relationships while increasing productivity as a result. Data from 2022 also found investing in “the development of strong coaching culture is not just a competitive advantage — it's a business imperative. According to the data, companies with high coaching culture have significantly higher revenue five-year average growth (14% higher) than low coaching culture companies.” Aug 4, 2022 Better Up Study.
Lately I’ve seen diverse industries hiring their own career coaching third party services as an “Employee Wellness Benefit.” Some are hiring Career Coaches to assist with organizational goals around DEI, Diversity Equity, and Inclusion. Some are hiring coaches for performance improvement, some for skill building to keep up with advances in AI, and others to mitigate disgruntled (potentially litigious) employees to help improve morale and cope with organizational change. Other Companies are responding to employee attitude survey results, where employees are requesting more career development assistance while trying to manage an uncertain future. The best companies hire career coaching because they know to attract and retain top talent they must offer the benefits in greatest demand. Career coaching provides a safety net for employees worried about their futures. Why wellness? Because coaching also helps calm anxiety and the mental health (confidence in the future) that comes with proactive contingency planning.
Why would companies invest in attracting and retaining top talent when they are laying off employees?
It’s the surviving employees that companies worry about losing during times of transition. The cost of losing those most ‘valuable to the core of the business’ is what keeps executives up at night. These are employees that add significant revenue, relationships, innovation, and value to the bottom line of any organization - not easily replaceable. During times of lay-offs, this is when companies need to bring in coaches to help the survivors cope and understand their role within their existing organization moving forward. Coaches also help surviving employees strategize how to cope and work smarter with added work demands on productivity with fewer people and uncover the mindset that the ‘grass is not always greener’ somewhere else. Coaches in this instance significantly help with retention and problem solving. Once lay- offs are over, and companies are ready to hire again, then marketing one’s company as “Best Place to Work” by offering Career Coaching as an Employee benefit is a powerful method of attracting diverse top talent. Over the past 25 years of researching attitude survey results of Fortune 500 company employees- Career Coaching has remained on the “Top Five” list of desirable benefits.
Why would companies add Career Coaching as a benefit, just so employees could take the career assistance and leave?
It’s important to recognize no one can force employees to stay within an organization. Most employers that hire third party coaches to partner and assist their existing HR staff do so because they want engaged productive employees who are fully transparent with their career goals and how they want to contribute; those who are fully vested and want to stay after examining their career options- not those who have blinders on head down simply working for a paycheck. Promoting career self-reliance as we’ve seen in decades past is a method to achieve retention and best place to work, not to promote attrition.
Why not just use an EAP benefit?
Employee Assistance therapists specialize in therapy involving substance abuse, divorce, anxiety, depression, grief, parenting and caring for elderly parents, and severe mental health disorders. They are typically not trained in areas of how to work through office politics, career assessments, career roadmaps, career decision making, succession planning based on future needs of the organization. However Career Coaches that are trained in Industrial Psychology and Business Counseling, who know your business and can coach and problem solve with all employees through top executives of your organization to achieve the increased results in productivity and retention that career coaches can. They are worth their weight in gold and for a very affordable cost. In addition, they are educators and can coach employees around how to improve their performance and develop the most valuable skills the company needs them to develop for the future.
Unlike EAP counselors who focus primarily on personal issues, career coaches can also focus on:
· personal needs as well (such as stress/ coping skills relationship building skills with bosses and co-workers)
· business strategy performance coaching
· education planning, whether an MBA or a technical certificate would give the individual and the organization the most ROI for the future- to use tuition reimbursement money wisely
· coaching on how to build credibility, how to maximize influence and impact
· leadership development and career assessments to build a roadmap for the future.
Due to the versatility of the certified Career Counselor and Coach, this is why the best companies hire third party coaches in addition to the EAP as an employee wellness benefit. The services complement one another yet are not redundant.
To Learn more about Career Coaching as an employee benefit or to request a pilot program for your organization go to https://www.careeru.com/services-corp
Alice Rush is a Fortune 500 Company Career Development Consultant, published author of Paid to Play, Video Game Careers, Green Careers: Choosing Work for a Sustainable Future, CareerU® for Success former Columnist, former Freelance Writer for EHow, Live TV interviewee for national news stations and NPR, Good Day Sacramento on trending career development topics; career development projects she has worked on have been profiled in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Forbes, Personnel Journal