Strategies for employee engagement: HR leaders share insights on retention, development and the role of AI
A recent WorkLife webinar sponsored by the coaching platform BetterUp brought together HR executives and researchers to discuss critical strategies for employee engagement, retention and development in today’s complex workplace landscape.
The conversation, moderated by Digiday editor-in-chief Jim Cooper and senior editor Tony Case, featured insights from leaders at Charter Communications, Vanguard and Dayforce, along with groundbreaking research from BetterUp.
Here are highlights from those conversations. If your missed it you can watch the full program here
Prioritizing affordability and frontline workers
Paul Marchand, EVP and CHRO at Charter Communications, emphasized that understanding employee needs starts with recognizing what matters most to your workforce. For Charter’s nearly 100,000 employees — 70-80% of whom are frontline workers — affordability tops the list of concerns.
“The most important thing is affordability,” Marchand explained. He highlighted an innovative policy where Charter absorbs annual healthcare cost increases rather than passing them to employees. “While that’s an expense to our P&L, we got to figure out how to account for that, it’s meaningful to that frontline worker,” he said.
This approach prevents the stagnation that occurs when healthcare premium increases offset merit raises. “Every year somebody gets a salary increase, cost of living increase of 2, 3, 4 or 5% — those things then offset each other, and you ultimately have a stagnation of that frontline worker not being able to move up,” Marchand noted.
Charter has also opened three on-site medical facilities at larger work sites, creating easier access to healthcare for employees who need it most.
Transforming education benefits
One of Charter’s most impactful initiatives came directly from employee feedback during field visits. Marchand described how the company completely redesigned its education benefits program after discovering the traditional tuition reimbursement model didn’t serve frontline workers effectively.
The old system required employees to pay upfront for courses and wait months for reimbursement — a significant barrier for workers living paycheck to paycheck. Charter partnered with Guild Education to create a tuition assistance program where the company pays all costs directly and upfront.
The results have been considerable. “We have an 8.5% participation rate greater than the traditional tuition reimbursement program,” Marchand reported. Sixty-eight percent of participants in the education benefit are frontline workers, he noted, adding, “Those that are in it are getting promoted at about a 25% higher rate than the person that’s not in the programming, and we’re seeing a 10% lift in retention.”
Situational flexibility: Beyond remote work
When discussing workplace flexibility, Marchand introduced Charter’s concept of “situational flexibility” — a more nuanced approach than simply offering remote work options. For a company providing critical infrastructure services, most employees couldn’t work from home during the pandemic.
“It’s really about a kinder, more gentler, more understanding manager,” he explained. “It’s not just about a doctor’s appointment. It’s also life events — my child’s graduating, their performing in their last play for this year, there’s a big sport event.”
This policy gives managers and employees more freedom to accommodate life’s important moments without rigid structures, recognizing that work and life inevitably overlap.
Internal mobility as retention strategy
Maxim Tambling, global head of talent management at the investment management firm Vanguard, shared how the company’s commitment to internal mobility has created market-leading retention rates. Vanguard maintains approximately 8% voluntary attrition — less than half the industry average.
“We would attribute a couple of factors to our really market-leading attrition,” Tambling said. “Our culture more broadly, but then this sense of rotation being a way to develop your career.”
Vanguard aims for 70-80% of senior leadership roles to be filled internally, ensuring business continuity while allowing for fresh external perspectives when needed. The company recently promoted a new officer class where 44% had worked in multiple departments before reaching that level.
Tambling shared one success story: an employee who progressed from finance to investment products to strategy to a client-facing wealth management role. “This is a person we see on our succession plans who we think can run a large business line for us,” he explained. Each rotation gave her deeper understanding of different aspects of the business.
The talent forum: Strategic rotation at scale
Vanguard’s most unique practice is its monthly Talent Forum, where the entire senior executive team convenes for 90 minutes to discuss talent moves and opportunities across the organization.
“Every single division, every single business line, every single function represented because of our senior executive being at the table, and they will debate and discuss who are the best people to move into the opportunities we have,” Tambling said.
This transparency creates shared accountability and prevents talent hoarding. However, Tambling cautioned against moving people too quickly. “We almost got a bit rotation happy, and we were moving people too early before they had the level of experience they needed,” he said. The company now aims for rotations every three to five years at senior levels.
Coaching, mentoring and sponsorship: Understanding the differences
Steve Knox, VP of global talent acquisition at HCM tech company Dayforce, broke down three critical but often confused developmental relationships: coaches, mentors and sponsors. “Simply put, a coach talks to you, a mentor talks with you and a sponsor talks about you,” Knox explained.
Coaches help improve specific skills on a short-term basis and should be experts in the area where you need development. Mentors provide career guidance over time, often from outside your organization, offering objective perspective. Sponsors actively advocate for your advancement within your organization and must be positioned to influence decisions.
“It’s very rare that one person can play all three of these roles in an individual’s career,” Knox emphasized. “Don’t automatically assume that your manager is your sponsor.”
He pointed to the PIE model — Performance, Image and Exposure — noting that performance accounts for only 10-15% of career advancement. Image represents 25-30%, while exposure accounts for 60%. “Just keeping your head down and doing your work is just not good enough,” Knox said.
The evidence for AI coaching
Alex Liebscher, senior research scientist at BetterUp, presented groundbreaking findings from the industry’s first randomized controlled trial on AI coaching effectiveness.
Over four weeks, users of BetterUp’s AI coach were seven times more successful at developing positive new habits compared to generic ChatGPT users. They were 9.5 times more successful in eliminating stress and 11.5 times more successful in achieving high optimism.
“People that used our AI coach decreased stress by about 4%, whereas people that use ChatGPT actually increased their stress by about 8%,” Liebscher reported. The difference? BetterUp’s AI coach prompts reflection and processing, while ChatGPT primarily dispenses information, adding to people’s mental checklists.
The research revealed that AI coaching and human coaching serve complementary purposes. People use AI coaches for structured, task-oriented goals requiring immediate feedback, such as practicing difficult conversations. Human coaches excel at navigating complex, strategic, interpersonal challenges involving nuance and multiple variables.
“Human coaching and AI coaching are not really competing with each other. Instead, they’re really complementing each other,” Liebscher said.
Looking forward
As organizations navigate economic uncertainty, AI integration and evolving workplace expectations, these leaders emphasized that success requires a multifaceted approach: prioritizing affordability and access for frontline workers, creating genuine development pathways through internal mobility, helping employees build strategic relationships for career growth, and thoughtfully deploying both human and AI support.
The common thread across all presentations was the recognition that employee development isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor — it requires understanding your specific workforce, measuring outcomes and continuously adapting programs to meet evolving needs.