Horses are Great Coaches in our Changing Workplace

(About a 5-minute read)

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

[John F. Kennedy]

Our work environment and culture are constantly changing. The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact not only on how we work, but also on how much we value workplace flexibility and work-life balance, and what we expect from our employers and employees. While some trends may have been exacerbated by the pandemic, others have been constant forces since before COVID-19. Companies that embrace workplace trends are taking the opportunity to create more innovative and progressive organizations, and attract and retain talent in the process. Engaging in equine-assisted coaching programs could be one way to have a leg-up in the competition for talent. Here is why.

Welcome back to Spiegelbild!

Today I’ll give you three reasons why innovative coaching is good for your business and your employees.

First, recruiting talent can be costly! A company invests significant resources to search for the best talent through advertising, recruitment agencies, screening, interviewing and on-boarding.

And it is even more costly to lose great employees. Studies have found that the average cost of losing an employee can be as high as 33%. In other words, when an employee leaves, you haven’t just lost talent or time; you’ve also lost the embodied investment and will incur new rehiring costs.

The hiring and retention of skilled employees remains at the top of the priority list for human resources leaders. According to the 2023 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, 93% of organizations are concerned about employee retention. While the “great resignation” wave we witnessed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be behind us, talent development professionals continue to grapple with skills shortages and turnover risk for critical talent. Effective hiring and employee retention tactics are therefore extremely important to ensure the long-term success of your business.

While companies do spend a lot of money to attract the right people, not many invest in employee retention strategies. Why not keep the resources you’ve committed to find great employees and continue to invest in employee happiness instead?

Second, money isn’t everything. Employees seek validation for their work and want to be appreciated. Recent studies show that employees who don’t feel recognized when they do great work are almost two times as likely to be job hunting. Furthermore, 79% of people who quit their jobs cite “lack of appreciation” as their reason for leaving.

Training soft skills can be one way to increase employee satisfaction. It has been debated if soft skills truly are “soft”, or if they have not in fact become the new “hard skills” that are essential in today’s work environment. Responsibility, empathy, social skills, adaptability, management and leadership in a changing workplace, critical thinking, communication, creativity and problem-solving are all soft skills that are in particularly high demand. They can be taught and strengthened through well-designed on-the-job training.

A study that looked into the needs of the Millennial workforce found that dissatisfaction with on-the-job training and development programs, as well as communication and relationship issues with management are the primary reasons these young employees leave their jobs.

And finally, a lack of advancement or skill-building can be morally deflating. Findings of the 2023 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report are pretty clear: people who aren’t learning will leave. One of the top five factors that drive people to seek new jobs is not being offered opportunities to learn and develop new skills.

Proactively building employee skills for today and tomorrow can therefore help navigate the evolving future of work and its related challenges. By investing in professional development, such as upskilling and reskilling initiatives, you can prove to your employees that you care about them and are invested in their career growth.

“Now”, you might ask, “what does all of this have to do with equine-assisted coaching?” Let me tell you.

Coaching focusses on personal and professional development. A coach will not give you readily developed answers or solutions but will instead ask targeted questions to help you develop your own solutions. You can read more about the differences between coaching, mentoring and training in my recent blog here. At Spiegelbild we have developed a unique approach to individual, couples and team coaching that involves horses as “co-coaches”. This makes our programs highly individualized.

Equine-assisted coaching is an excellent way of teaching soft skills. Responsibility, empathy, adaptability, resilience, active listening, and body awareness are skills that are lived through the interaction with the horse — not lectured.

The horse acts as a mirror and amplifies interpersonal dynamics — whether within an existing team, or through self-reflection for individuals. A horse reacts to the way people show up, interact and communicate, and makes each equine-assisted coaching program as unique as the people who are participating in it — it reflects each coachee’s contribution, specific skills, talents and inherent intelligence.

Experiential learning, like ours, lets people retain what they have learned for longer Investing in equine-assisted coaching as an on-the-job career development program can therefore lead to a better return on investment than more generic, traditional training programs.

As such, investing in equine-assisted coaching for your employees can be one way to recognize their contribution to your company, appreciate their great work and motivate them to stay with you.

If you’re curious to learn more about our equine-assisted coaching programs and whether they might be a good addition to your personal and career development programs please go to our website and book a free 30-minute discovery call. We are here for you — one human-horse partnership at a time.

If you’d like to read more about current workplace trends here are a few sources to check out:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-621-m/11-621-m2022022-eng.htm

https://www.tinypulse.com/blog/17-surprising-statistics-about-employee-retention

https://emeritus.org/blog/the-future-of-work-workplace-trends/

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JMD-08-2015-0110/full/html

https://learning.linkedin.com/resources/workplace-learning-report

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