Here's the uncomfortable part. You can't recruit your way out of this. Replacing a clinical staff member is expensive and slow, and the replacement arrives into the same conditions that pushed the last person out. The 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention Report puts the average cost of a single RN separation at $60,090 and hospital turnover at 18.5%. Coaching roles aren't nursing roles, but they sit in the same labor market and the same math applies: every coach who walks takes months of ramp, member relationships, and program knowledge with them.
The burnout data is worse than most leaders assume
Coaching-specific turnover data barely exists. The closest reliable proxy is the behavioral health workforce, and those numbers are stark.
In a Harris Poll conducted for the National Council for Mental Wellbeing (750 behavioral health workers, February 2023):
Those aren't people who dislike the work. They're people who like the work and can't get to enough of it.
Driver one: admin is eating the job
This is the finding worth pinning to the wall. In that same survey, 33% of behavioral health workers said they spend most of their time on administrative tasks.
It isn't unique to behavioral health. Sinsky and colleagues, writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2016, found physicians spend roughly two hours on desk and electronic record work for every hour of direct patient care.
Think about what that does to a coach. They trained for the conversation. They took the job for the conversation. Then scheduling, reminders, progress tracking, note-taking, and reporting quietly claim the majority of the week. The job they applied for isn't the job they have.
This is also the driver you can move fastest, because most of that work isn't clinical judgment. It's coordination, and coordination automates.
The clearest example in our own book is an insurance services company that sells wellness programs, including coaching, to its own clients. It moved from in-house coaching staff to a program managed by Avidon in early 2021.
Read that last part again, because it's the retention argument. One coach absorbed a 67% increase in delivered sessions, and did it because the onboarding, communications, and appointment booking stopped being her job.
A separate client, a 40,000-employee health system, faced running a wellness challenge by hand after a 2023 staffing disruption. Manually the effort was projected at more than 540 staff hours and over $37,800, and it would have required nine additional coaches. Run on Avidon, the same program cost roughly $5,000. Ask what those 540 hours would have cost you in coach goodwill, not just dollars.
Driver two: caseloads that drifted
Caseload rarely gets set. It accumulates. A client contract expands, a colleague leaves, coverage gets absorbed, and nobody revisits the number.
The behavioral health data shows how common that drift is:
Severity is the part leaders miss. The same caseload gets heavier when the members inside it get harder, and the headcount number on your dashboard won't show it.
If you haven't deliberately sized your caseloads against complexity and contact frequency, they're almost certainly wrong. Our guide to caseload management walks through how to set that number on purpose.
Driver three: the first year nobody structured
Across all healthcare roles, 29.5% of new hires leave within their first year (NSI, 2026). First-year attrition is a different problem from general turnover, and it responds to a different fix.
The MGMA's May 2026 poll of medical group leaders is instructive here. Practices reporting lower turnover credited deliberate investment in onboarding and training, more predictable scheduling, clearer career paths, and culture. Practices with steady or rising turnover leaned on reactive fixes: temporary staffing and recruiting adjustments.
A coach who reaches competence in a week builds member relationships while their confidence is still high. A coach who spends three months guessing starts drafting an exit while they're still learning your intake process. We covered the mechanics in onboarding a new coach.
What actually changes the number
Four moves, in the order that produces the fastest relief:
Notice that three of the four are about giving coaching time back. That's not a coincidence. Coaches don't burn out from coaching.
Does protecting coach time cost you quality?
The reasonable worry is that automating around coaches makes the experience more impersonal, and members feel it.
Avidon's own data points the other way. In a controlled study of 300 non-incentivized participants split into three equal groups, program completion ran:
| Group | Program completion |
|---|---|
| No coaching | 17% |
| Live coaching alone | 28% |
| Coaching plus Avidon technology | 36%, a 112% improvement over no coaching |
Across roughly 700 participants and more than 6,700 digital coaching sessions, coaching averaged 4.7 out of 5.0, and 97% of members said they would recommend their coach.
The technology didn't replace the relationship. It cleared the calendar so the relationship could happen.
The one metric to start tracking
Most coaching teams track caseload and utilization. Almost none track coaching time as a percentage of paid time. Start there. It's the leading indicator for the turnover you'll see in nine months, it's measurable this quarter, and unlike compensation, it's fully within your control. When that percentage climbs, retention follows, because your coaches finally get to do the job they came for.
If your current tooling is what's driving that percentage down, see how Avidon works for coaching companies and wellness platforms, along with our take on build vs. buy.
