How Coaching for Employees Can Help Financial Services Companies Elevate Their Team’s Performance and Wellbeing

The global financial services market is flourishing and is expected to reach $28.5 trillion by 2025.

Despite the pandemic, many financial services companies, or finserv companies, have managed to maintain steady growth. However, the pandemic has brought to light challenges within the industry. These challenges include ensuring the wellbeing and high level of engagement of teams; competing to attract and retain high quality and diverse talent; and ensuring high levels of productivity.

An employee coaching platform can help companies respond to these challenges. Finserv companies can utilize coaching at scale for employees as a powerful strategy to increase productivity and empower growing teams. Coaching has been proven to increase wellbeing and engagement; improve employee retention; boost productivity; and foster an inclusive culture. Across the board, coaching for employees can enable finserv teams to operate successfully, and should be embraced by more leaders. Read on for more.

Professional Coaching Enhances Workforce Wellbeing and Engagement

Stress can lead to employees becoming disengaged and unproductive. Almost two-thirds of managers in the finance sector have experienced burnout during the pandemic. Coaching can help financial services leaders and their teams to effectively deal with certain causes of stress. Coaches can offer actionable solutions to help teams become more effective and resilient, whatever their working conditions.

Introducing an employee coaching platform that makes coaching available as and when the employee needs it, encourages employees to be more open, sincere, and involved. This transforms the workplace into an engaging environment for employees. And when employees are engaged, they are more likely to stay and become highly productive.

Additionally, coached employees have better work-life balance, and are more empowered to thrive within their role. 90% of workers say they are more likely to stay at a company that takes and acts on their feedback. Through coaching, employees can get better at giving and receiving feedback.

An Employee Coaching Platform Helps Increase Employee Retention

There is a great resignation afoot, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the U.S., more than 4.1 million have already left their companies as of July 2021. Of those who stayed, an estimated 41% of workers are now considering quitting their current jobs in the coming months.

Whilst a certain level of turnover is always healthy, when key talent leaves, it is incredibly costly for your business. It takes time and money to find, onboard and train a successor.

According to research, 87% of highly engaged employees are less likely to leave their employers than their disengaged counterparts. One key to keeping high engagement and therefore retention is continuous development and support for each employee, in a tailored manner. Why? Because over 80% of employees said they would leave if they perceive companies to be indifferent to their professional and personal growth and fail to provide them with development opportunities. Professional coaching is the only resource that does that.

It is imperative for companies to be proactive instead of reactive in providing learning and development for their team and empower employees to craft their development journey. This is why coaching employees at every level must be a core part of a company’s culture. When employees see that their company is committed to their development and provide them opportunities for professional growth, they see it as an incentive to stay and become valuable contributors.

An Employee Coaching Platform Increases Team Productivity and Agility

Many successful finserv leaders have benefitted from the guidance of expert coaches. Imagine what would happen if you gave this superpower to all your employees too. Leaders can help their teams prosper by introducing coaching for all employees.

Financial services employees are used to fast-paced environments. Coaching allows finserv teams to become more productive and agile, enabling them to create more positive conditions for problem-solving and collaboration. Over 70% of people who were coached benefited from improved work performance, relationships and effective communication skills.

Finserv companies are increasingly looking to infuse agility into their operating models. Coaching helps encourage innovation while ensuring agility in a competitive finserv market. It helps inspire new ideas, helps staff refocus and reclarify, and improve their decision-making skills.

Coaches can help people unlock their potential and reach their goals. By investing in coaching for employees, financial services leaders can supercharge their learning and development programs by fully supporting employees and optimising agility.

Employees become more engaged and productive when companies are proactive about supporting their well-being and development, especially in hybrid or fully remote work models.

Coaching for Employees helps create more diverse and inclusive cultures

It is well recognised that driving efforts in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace is crucial.

Why? Because 40% of men and 36% of women from under-represented demographics voluntarily exit companies where they do not feel included.

The benefits of having diverse teams are well-recognised. For companies that implement fair DEI programs, the benefits are impressive:

• One study revealed that employees that work for enterprises with inclusive cultures are 19% more likely to stay.
• Inclusive teams boast a 2x faster decision-making process over a non-inclusive group.
• Diverse teams achieve 60% better results and generate 19% higher revenue because of their tendency to innovate.

Helping leader’s develop an inclusive mindset is important when it comes to unlocking the true potential of a diverse workforce.  Coaching provides a safe space for leaders to explore their challenges, gain awareness of both their conscious as well as unconscious biases, and broaden their perspective through continuous dialogue and reflection.  By holding leaders accountable, coaching encourages them to take responsibility for building and sustaining inclusive behaviours within their teams.

Targeted Coaching for Financial Services Companies

At Sama, our co-founders, team members and coaches have had extensive careers in high performing professional and financial services companies. We understand the unique and escalating challenges faced by financial services leaders in managing distributed teams across all levels of a finserv company.

Coaching is a very effective way to build resilience and agility, and support a truly cohesive culture. An employee coaching platform can support your teams no matter where they are located. Employees can access the online coaching app anytime, and work with their own coach, when and where needed.

With Sama’s employee coaching platform, you can create an inclusive and psychologically safe culture where employees can be their best selves. CEOs, managers, business owners, and leaders have all benefited greatly from receiving coaching. By offering coaching as a company wide benefit, to all, not only your senior professionals, you can show employees that you are invested in them and are willing to support their personal leadership journey.