Liina Adov, DEBI manager and senior personal coach at Pipedrive, discusses how her organization’s approach to employee well-being support has helped foster a culture of teamwork and problem-solving.
By Maggie Mancini
As 2024 draws to a close, employers anticipate another year of cost increases for health benefits, according to research from Mercer. Organizations are looking to stay cost-effective while ensuring that employees have access to the wellness support that they need. With this in mind, some companies are foregoing traditional well-being stipends in favor of free, internal, and fully integrated personal coaching programs that aim to keep well-being support accessible to all employees.
Liina Adov, diversity, equity, belonging, and inclusion (DEBI) manager and senior personal coach at Pipedrive, explains that if companies don’t make wellness easily accessible, the benefits will go unused, leading to organizations wasting their money. HRO Today sat down with Adov to talk about the organization’s approach to coaching and how it has made well-being support more accessible for Pipedrive employees.
HRO Today: What can you tell me about Pipedrive’s fully integrated personal coaching program?
Liina Adov: We’re a technology company, so a substantial portion of our employees are in engineering. The personal coaching program grew out of a test to see how this sort of initiative would support those members of our organization.
Throughout those tests, we wanted to see how people engage with coaches and how they engage with external support from psychologists and mental health professionals. We reached a point where we wanted to measure the engagement of a more independent, internal program for counseling and coaching that’s accessible to everybody. It’s free for all employees. It started off with our engineers because they have the largest teams, and those leaders wanted to know how they could support their people better.
We have agile coaches who are primarily working on coaching and development for our engineers. But we also have people who are working on providing support and resources for personal and professional growth. That’s our focus—people come to work as a whole person, so we can’t really leave behind the personal part of us to come to work and only be professionals. Whatever happens to us in our professional lives also impacts us in our personal lives, and we want to make sure that our people as a whole are as good as they can be and feel as good as they can be.
HROT: Pipedrive’s personal coaches are all current employees at the company. How does this impact the program’s effectiveness?
Adov: Having coaches as part of the team is important. We’re coaches, but we’re colleagues as well, so we’re aware of the organization and how it works. We know what the challenges are, what we’re going through as an organization, and what initiatives people are working on. Having that understanding of the company and where we are enables us to be there in the best way and find the best solutions for our people.
With that also comes challenges, but we have made it clear from the beginning how important boundaries and confidentiality are to the program. Whatever is shared in coaching stays there, which provides safety. Employees can really unpack their challenges and have someone to help them figure out the way forward, because we do believe that our people have what it takes to be successful.
Sometimes, we have obstacles, or decisions to make that are quite difficult, but it’s important to find a way forward. This creates a culture of coaching and talking and tackling obstacles as a team.
The coaching program’s accessibility helps ensure that we can tackle challenges early on. We also ask for feedback from clients and coaches internally to see how likely people would be to recommend personal coaching to their colleagues based on their personal experiences. We have had overwhelmingly positive feedback on this, as the average is over nine points on a 10-point scale. And I do think those recommendations are encouraging for others and help them to feel safe to reach out.
HROT: Going along with that, how does the personal coaching program help support and advance Pipedrive’s commitment to DEIB practices?
Adov: When I started at Pipedrive, I started off as a personal coach. I previously worked as a psychologist, and it seemed like a good challenge to move into coaching. The role grew from there, as we were finding different ways to be there for employees and the company as well.
The topic of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging—or DEBI, as we call it—has always been close to my heart, and I saw there were some opportunities to combine these things. Much like our DEIB initiatives, personal coaching is there to support people and create an environment where everybody can thrive. And we love to see our diverse pool of colleagues and figure out ways to support them and make sure everyone is being treated equally and fairly. They both thrive in the same direction.
We have seen that many of the initiatives we’re bringing to life really are relevant to both coaching and DEIB. Some examples include our recent conversations around mental health and neurodiversity this October.
We have always focused on mental health within the personal coaching program because many of us have backgrounds in psychology, and we understand that there are still so many areas to explore. Last year, we focused a lot on burnout. This year, through our conversations with colleagues, we are focusing on imposter syndrome.
We always have coaches around to whom people can reach out and talk about these different topics and find support for navigating those topics. While our coaches don’t share what is said during coaching sessions, they can bring out some high-level topics that are more reoccurring in their conversations. There is still so much to discuss surrounding neurodiversity as well, and these conversations are still ongoing, so we will see where those discussions lead and what our next focus points will be going forward. It’s important for us to understand how we can build the support and the culture that really understands and creates a safe space for all our colleagues.
HROT: How can HR leaders help keep their wellness benefits easily accessible to employees?
Adov: Some of the biggest sponsors of the personal coaching program are our managers who have had experiences with us within the coaching program or who have had conversations with us. Showing that these topics are okay to talk about in the workplace is especially important, whether it’s wellness, career growth, professional growth, personal growth, coaching is an important door opener for people to be more curious and reach out for help when they need it.
Whether you’re interacting with internal or external benefits, it can be difficult to take that step because it can be quite daunting to reach out and find ways to deal with the challenges that you’re experiencing.
For managers, modeling and talking about these topics openly and connecting employees to existing resources and encouraging people to use them is key to keeping those benefits as accessible as possible. If managers have their own experiences utilizing these benefits, being able to talk about those experiences openly can also help keep them accessible to employees.
Personal coaching is a great example of an accessible benefit because it’s free and internal, so it’s easy to reach out directly to the coaches rather than going through a manager or someone else.
Liina Adov is the diversity, equity, belonging, and inclusion (DEBI) manager and senior personal coach at Pipedrive.
