Creating a system of online coaching management - to enhance the quality and consistency of coaching and measure results across the company - changing the way Tesco oversees coaching and improving outcomes for the company.
Client: Tesco
Challenge: A dispersed and decentralised coaching management system produced a lack of transparency and no way of measuring coaching results
Solution: Coaching Focus’ Mye-Coach system
Result: 37 registered coaches, improved management of coaches, deeper understanding of the coaching needs of staff, and the possibility of identifying gaps in their coaching pool to look towards improvement. Plans to implement this system at a global level across the company.
Tesco is a leading retailer across the UK and internationally, serving millions of customers every week both in their stores and online. They are committed to their core purpose of “Serving Britain’s shoppers a little better every day”, and aim to provide products for all people. With over 500,000 staff worldwide, Tesco realises the importance of looking after their people and supporting their development in order to achieve their purpose and potential within the company.
A dispersed coaching management approach produced a lack of transparency, co-dependencies and an absence of coaching results
Tesco was aiming to support their staff by offering coaching with trained and experienced coaches to those staff who it was considered would benefit from this extra guidance. However, this proved difficult to execute due to a fragmented approach to the management of their coaching programme. With coaching budgets managed separately across all functions, and no way of monitoring the coaches, or evaluating the success of the coaching. Tesco became aware of cases of co-dependency where long-term coaching relationships were allowed to continue for long periods of time without being reviewed or having the desired results.
As explained by Tesco Head of Group Capability, Gill Chapman, their costs were higher than necessary, and from a Leadership Development perspective, there was no credibility.
“We couldn’t see what difference coaching had made, we couldn’t identify any common themes emerging from coaching which would give us some useful data around the leadership development people really needed”.
Furthermore, the quality of the coaches was starting to be questioned, consequently, Tesco was in need of simplifying their Coaching provision, by reviewing their supplier base and bringing their coaches onto one platform to be able to monitor the provision of coaching support throughout the company more carefully and thereby provide a more effective service to Tesco staff.
Coaching Focus provided the solution to centralise Tesco’s systems and manage their coaching needs
After unsuccessfully attempting to implement processes internally to resolve these issues, Tesco decided to look for a solution externally. Coaching Focus was chosen as the provider that had what they were looking for: a single provider who could manage coaching needs, provide the flexibility for Tesco to use the base of coaches that were already in place but also who had contacts with experienced coaches that could supplement the pool. Overall a provider who knew what good coaching looked like! Also, an important factor for Tesco was to have a system that was accessible and self-serving for their staff as they wanted coaching to be easily accessed, not unapproachable and an isolated ivory tower-like system controlled by HR.
Coaching Focus could provide all of this and more to Tesco through the Mye-coach system. An online coaching management system that can effectively administer and manage coaches, process coaching requests, maintain a consistent approach to coaching throughout an organisation and support coaching interventions to ensure transparency, openness and ROI. Equally important as the system itself was and is the consulting time Tesco received from Trayton and his team who guided them through the process of setting up the Hub, and the continued support in the challenges they meet along the way.
Having a platform to oversee their coaches has allowed Tesco to identify gaps and better understand the needs of their staff
By using Mye-coach to monitor the coaches and oversee their coaching processes, Tesco has seen a drastic improvement in the quality of coaching delivered throughout the company by the 37 coaches already signed onto the Hub. The Hub has allowed Tesco to collect data, monitor the coaches and understand more swiftly and clearly the coaching needs of their staff both as individuals and overall. It has ensured that coaches and coachees follow due process and has created a more transparent and accountable system. Furthermore, as Gill Chapman testifies, they have been able to identify the gaps in their pool of coaches and act to fill these gaps. “When you’re looking at the coaches that you’ve got on the system…it’s much easier to judge or evaluate the quality of your coach pool and realise that actually there may be some gaps… It’s allowed us to do exactly what we need to do”, says Gill. “It also made us realise that we didn’t have as much coaching going on as we thought we did.”
Another benefit to using Mye-coach for Tesco has been the distance it’s been able to create between the coaches and the company. It can often be a challenge for coaches to maintain independence from the company they are working with, so now that Coaching Focus manages the coaches there is less dependence on Tesco, which has been an unexpected added benefit according to Gill.
The next challenge: how to scale up and improve Tesco’s coaching systems worldwide. The next step for Tesco is to increase their coaching pool on the Mye-coach Hub to enable their staff to have a wider range of coaches to choose from, and not rely so heavily on personal links and colleague recommendations. Following on from increasing the number of coaches on the system, whilst Mye-coach has only been implemented within the UK at this stage, there is significant interest from other countries to encourage Tesco now to look into ways to implement the coaching system throughout their offices globally. Whilst it will be a challenge, this is something they are determined to accomplish building on the success of their achievements in the UK.