Wholesale mortgage lender United Shore’s Yourtime is a company-wide coaching system that prompts each of its 443 company leaders in all business units to conduct a half-monthly coaching session with each of their direct reports. All 4,300 team members are required to participate and complete their “Yourtimes” before the 15th of each month. No business units or team members are exempt from completing their monthly Yourtimes—even the CEO conducts a monthly Yourtime with each of his 11 C-suite reports.
Program Details
On the last day of each month, the Yourtime system prompts team members to provide their leaders with three topics they’d like to discuss leaders during their Yourtime Session. The team member can discuss any topic he or she chooses. Topics could include: personal subjects, career advancement, or struggles/team member concerns. Nothing is off the table. After the team member sends the topics, company leaders are prompted via e-mail and learning management system (LMS) notification to identify two team member strengths and one improvement opportunity to discuss with their team member and then to schedule their monthly coaching session with their direct reports (the number of direct reports for each leader is limited to 12). The leader then schedules the one-on-one coaching session through the Yourtime system (which is linked with the Outlook calendars of both team members and company leaders), and conducts the Yourtime Coaching Session with the team member.
During the Yourtime Session, the leader discusses the team member’s topics for 10 to 20 minutes and then spends the final 10 minutes discussing the team member’s strengths and opportunities to maintain and focus on throughout the month.
Yourtime aims to be a positive experience for team members and to provide both the leader and team member opportunities to provide one another with feedback and build stronger relationships. At the conclusion of the Yourtime Meeting, the leader completes the Yourtime and sends it to the team member to confirm the conversation has occurred. The team member has the opportunity to add additional commentary if desired and closes out the Yourtime Session by confirming.
The CEO personally reaches out to any leader who has not completed his or her Yourtime by the monthly deadline. Team leaders also follow up weekly on opportunities identified in a team member’s Yourtime. Long-term reinforcement of Yourtime Coaching Sessions are followed up by the Team Relations Coaching Team semi-annually with each team member.
United Shore’s CEO, Chief People Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and VP of Training make up the Yourtime Committee, which ensures that Yourtimes are conducted and that training on Yourtime Coaching is available twice per month for the company’s 443 leaders. All four co-facilitate the Yourtime training sessions with the Leadership Development Team every month. The committee also approves and implements changes to the Yourtime system.
Results
Yourtime maintains a 98 percent approval rating with team members (via surveys conducted by Best Workplaces and United Shore’s internal audit team). The Yourtime completion rate was at 99.8 percent, even though United Shore doubled the size of its workforce last year.
YourTime has led to 375 process improvements since its inception and a 2 percent increase in employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) in 2019 (from 79 percent to 81 percent), and a 25 percent increase over the last four years. This helped United Shore exceed its eNPS goal of 68 percent by 13 percent in 2019. The performance coaching also facilitated exponential production growth over the last three years and has been instrumental in a $61 billion increase in loan originations last year.
