So, let’s cover the basics and then move on to the juicy part.

What is Employee Coaching?

In a nutshell, coaching an employee means that you’re helping employees reach their full potential. You work with them on improving their skills, understanding the objectives and overcoming obstacles and challenges at work.

How do You Coach Employees?

As with any other coaching practice, it can take many different forms. Most frequently, employee coaching involves scheduling individual sessions with employees (in case of an in-house coach, these should not be mistaken for your regular one-on-ones). 

Coaching sessions should be a safe space for employees. They need to be comfortable sharing the good and the bad in order to improve their performance, productivity and solve problems. 

Even though employee coaching must be aligned with the company goals and objectives, keep in mind that your client is always the employee. So your first and foremost concern should be the employee and the challenges s/he is facing no matter how that relates to the current workplace.

What Is the Focus of Employee Coaching?

The focus of employee coaching is to celebrate wins and identify obstacles that prevent employees from performing at their best. This is achieved through working on developing and enhancing employee skills in order to improve performance and productivity. In return, investing in employee growth through coaching improves the overall employee contribution.

How Can Coaching Enhance Employee Skills?

Although beneficial, a coach doesn’t have to know how to do the work of an employee to be able to help him or her improve their performance and develop skills. Through regular meetings and continuous feedback, the coach can help employees work on their problematic areas. The more employees are aware of their weaknesses, the more they’ll be able to work on improving them. Additionally, a coach can help an employee find a mentor with a needed expertise for the skill the employee is looking to improve. Finally, the coach can encourage employees to talk to their manager openly about their professional development needs and ask for help to find the solution.

Long story short, it takes consistency and collaboration. Through partnering with employees and managers, coaches help organizations grow by working together to enhance employee skills and improve performance.

8 Tips for Employee Performance Coaching in the Workplace

Remember to Coach

It is often hard to step back and let the other person do the talking. This is especially hard if you’re an internal coach who’s also the team manager. Switching between the two roles can be challenging, but not impossible. 

For the purpose of this article, it is important to remember that as a coach, you coach – you don’t manage. What does that mean?

Coaching process is a collaboration, or partnership, between the coach and the coachee. When you’re coaching your employees, let them take the lead when it comes to the content. Ask them questions, listen, ask for clarification, guide the process but don’t give solutions because then you won’t be in the role of a coach anymore. 

Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share your thoughts and knowledge. Step back but don’t hold back. Provide feedback, share experiences, create a safe space for growth, but follow the lead of your employee and address their concerns. Remember, the focus is on the employee and them figuring things out, not you telling them what to do.

Praise Achievements and Growth

Offering constructive feedback is essential to growth. Talking about mistakes and how to fix them helps employees understand where they need to improve. However, praising employees may be even more important at some points when it comes to improving employee performance.

Giving positive feedback reinforces the expectations you have for them and assures them that you have confidence in their abilities to maintain or exceed those expectations.

Indeed

Praising your employees reminds them of the trust you’ve placed in them. It motivates your employees to feel good about themselves, which in turn motivates them to keep doing a good job. Also, it can be a good reference point when they make a mistake – it will prevent negative thinking and self-pity.

Help Identify Roadblocks

Often, when we feel stuck, we can’t see the clear picture and the direction we’re supposed to take. As a coach, it is your job to help employees identify the obstacles and create action plans to overcome them. 

Sometimes, just letting employees tell you about the problem can be beneficial and they’ll come up with the cause of the problem on their own. Other times, you’ll have to ask questions to understand the situation better in order to be able to help.

It is frequently the case that the roadblocks are hidden in employees’ perceptions or assumptions they make so make sure to ask about anything and everything. This may take some time, but the point of the process is to help employees move forward with their tasks, not to patch up an issue and move on.

Be Present

This one may be a bit more challenging, but it is so important for the coaching process. Being present means listening carefully to what employees are saying, not assuming anything. You can address their words, expressions, ask for clarification or just be quiet and give employees time to think and space to process.

You have to be there mentally, with them in that room and your thoughts should be directed to whatever the other person is saying. There will be times when you won’t know what to do next and that’s totally fine. Being open and honest with your coachee will take you a long way. 

Remember, transparency is the key in business, even when it comes to coaching. You don’t have to be a know-it-all. You just need to be there.

Build Confidence

Building confidence helps employees perform better. When they’re sure about their actions and decisions, they’ll spend less time questioning themselves and more time completing the task and moving onto the next one.

Coaching in the workplace should be highly oriented toward support and guidance. Employees who receive adequate support stand out in the process of achieving goals.

Attendance Bot Blog

Remind employees of their strengths and congratulate them every step of the way. When people know that they’re appreciated and valued, they’re more likely to invest themselves and give their very best.

Encourage Employees to Learn from Others

Over time and through experience, we tend to develop our own way of thinking and approach to tasks. Even if two people had the same education, they are different individuals so they’ll do the work differently.

Encourage your employees to interact with one another. This may go without saying when it comes to employees doing the same or a similar job, but interacting with employees who do something completely different can be beneficial, too. Communicating with their peers at work creates a collaborative environment and company culture. It also enables employees to seek help from their fellow coworkers. 

Learning on your own is great, but collaborating with others can be more efficient and effective at times; not to mention fun as well.

Build Self-Awareness and Reflection

By providing continuous feedback, you teach your employees how to approach a problem and see their own mistakes and wins. They become more self-aware and start understanding their patterns better. 

Self-reflection is important, not only when a mistake has been made, but also when a task has been completed or a problem solved. Understanding what works and what needs to be improved on a personal and team level can greatly help employees improve their performance and create better results.

Hold Employees Accountable

The coaching process starts with setting goals. Once employees commit to the goals they have set for themselves, it is your job to hold them accountable. As I’ve mentioned in my article on benefits of accountability coaching for startup founders and business owners, people are 95% more likely to reach their goals if they’re meeting regularly with the person they’ve committed to about a given goal. The more goals employees meet, the easier it’ll be for the business to scale and grow.

Peachy! Right?

Yes and no. Despite its many benefits and advantages, there are some disadvantages to coaching employees in the workplace. More often than not, coaching takes time and the results are not seen immediately.

Companies that are strict or are highly driven through results will not find coaching employees an ideal to see improvements in the short-term.

Attendance Bot Blog

Nonetheless, the benefits and perks of coaching outweigh these disadvantages by far. More and more companies are now on the lookout for a leadership style that is geared more towards coaching. The CEOs and founders tend to be more open to hiring a coach for their employees as they understand the long-term benefits of it. 

Finally, as I’ve already mentioned in my other articles, you don’t have to hire a professional coach to work with your employees. Managers can also learn coaching skills given enough time and resources. However, if you’re looking for maximum results and a more effective approach, I’d highly recommend connecting with a professional coach or a coaching organization.

The post 8 Tips for Coaching Employees to Improve Performance appeared first on Snowation.

Just like sport teams, business teams need coaches to help them grow and succeed as well. It seems like nowadays, more and more companies are opening up to coaching practices. They started realizing the potential of coaching and its importance when it comes to performance, growth and development. In this article, I’ll be exploring the connection between coaching and employee performance. We’ll look at what performance coaching is and why it should be done. Also, I’ll list several benefits of coaching for performance which help create stronger individuals and teams and ultimately help you drive your business forward.

What Is Coaching for Performance?

Coaching for performance is a coaching method used to identify areas of improvement when it comes to employee performance. However, not only does it identify gaps, but it also creates a learning and growth plan in order to close those gaps in employee performance.

This process involves open communication, encouraging and acknowledging good behavior and getting employees back on track. It also involves challenging team members to encourage growth and learning and holding them accountable for setting and achieving their goals.

Who Can Coach for Performance?

Some companies have internal coaches who have been trained to do this job. Nevertheless, a company can hire an external coach to improve employee performance as well. Finally, if you’re not in a position to work with a professional coach, any team leader can do this as well. All that’s needed is a bit of training in order for the leader to understand how effective coaching works and how to do it properly. 

For example, one of the most important things in coaching is creating a safe environment and building trust. So, if team members don’t trust a leader, the first step would be to change that situation. Otherwise, having such a person coach others could be detrimental to the business.

What Is the Purpose of Coaching in the Workplace?

One of the reasons you may want to introduce coaching in the workplace is to improve employee performance. As we’ll see further in the text, there are many aspects that coaches cover when they’re coaching for performance as many factors influence the results an employee presents during his or her working hours. 

In addition to performance, coaching is used in the workplace to create stronger bonds between teams, help team members resolve issues when it comes to communication, teamwork, personal and professional growth, etc. Finally, it gives employees a better understanding of how their growth fits into the company growth. In return, that clarity enables them to become more effective and efficient contributors in the workplace.

How Can Coaching Improve Performance?

As mentioned above, coaching for performance incorporates many aspects of one’s professional life. The areas listed below are just a few, but there are many others that can be included in the list. 

Personally, I believe that the greatest advantage of coaching for performance is the clarity it gives employees when it comes to their place in the organization. That alone enables employees to better define their goals, motivates them to contribute more and be more effective, thus turning workers into leaders and advocates of change. According to Forbes:

68% of workers say training and development is the most important workplace policy.

Ed Ross

With that in mind, let’s take a look at how coaching helps improve employee performance.

Creates Self-Awareness

A performance coach drives self-awareness among team members by providing feedback on behaviors, practices, and the results they produce. The insights and opportunities for improvement can help employees understand how to better achieve their goals.

CMOE

With time, employees will learn how to check on their practices and results on their own. They will be able to assess whether their processes are contributing to the company goals or not (and if not, how to change them). Additionally, through their experience with the coach, they will learn how to provide feedback for their team members as well, thus developing a skill they will benefit from in the long run (more on feedback later in the text). 

What’s important here is that the coach demonstrates self-awareness as well. By sharing examples from experience (either personal or from working with others), the coach is demonstrating the process itself, which can later be mirrored by team members. Finally, by asking for feedback on his or her own coaching practice, the coach shows the team what self-awareness looks like in practice.

Develops Problem-Solving Skills

Working with a coach means answering a lot of questions. Coaches share their experiences and offer feedback, but usually, coaches are there to observe, listen and ask questions whereas the coachee is the one coming up with answers. This leans back onto the self-awareness part mentioned above: we will remember things we’re told, but we’ll definitely stop and think about things we figured out on our own. 

As employees work with a coach, they learn how to detect and define problems. Yet, more importantly, they learn how to approach the problem in order to solve it. Developing problem-solving skills and critical thinking will benefit not only the employee but the company as well because the culture of problem solving (and not problem searching) is the one that goes above and beyond.

Improves Feedback and Open Communication

86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures.

Todd Kunsman

I have met so many people who claim to know how to give and receive feedback, but in practice it turned out to be the complete opposite. Even though it is not rocket science, knowing how to give and receive feedback is a form of art: there are patterns to be followed and it requires practice. Of course, as with any other skill, the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

When leaders and managers take the time to sit down with employees and talk openly with them, it builds trust. Building trust with employees makes them feel more comfortable to share their honest thoughts or opinions.

Unboxed

Working with a coach gives employees ample opportunities to give and receive feedback. In order to set the right goals, employees will have to be forthcoming with their interests, which direction they’d like to take when it comes to professional development, etc. 

Furthermore, being comfortable to speak up enables employees to share their pain points, ideas and suggestions and makes them more involved and interested in the company’s growth. Developing such a culture takes time, but you can always start with one person at a time.

Helps Reach More Goals

Coaches love setting goals, at least I do. It is such a powerful motivation for people because it gives them a direction, something to look forward to. In addition, the point of improving employee performance is to be able to produce better results (among other things). Now, how can a coach help?

Easy. The first step in the coaching process is to set goals. In case an employee doesn’t know how to set goals or doesn’t set goals in the right way, the coach is there to help. Through the coaching process, an employee can learn how to ask the right questions and what to consider to set more meaningful goals that align with the company’s goals and direction.

Then, the coach is there to hold employees accountable for their actions in order to achieve those goals. This helps employees stay on point and on the right track. What is more, it helps reduce procrastination, thus leading to achieving goals more effectively and efficiently.

Increases Employee Engagement

Employees who know that they’re taken care of are more likely to invest themselves into work. Regular one-on-ones encourage employees to take action and participate in building the company. Employees tend to take a more active role in the workplace if they know that their efforts are being acknowledged and appreciated. And what better way to show employees that you care about them than to help them work on their personal and professional development.

Enhances Ability to Coach Others

Through challenges and learning experiences that the coaching process offers, employees tend to change their perspective. As they work on their own improvement, many realize the benefits of coaching and are more willing to share that knowledge. Furthermore, they’re more willing to use the newly gained skills to help others grow. Having a positive experience with coaching can go a long way and have incredible positive effects on the overall growth of both employees and the employer.

Only when you can teach, do you really understand something. Being willing to set time aside to teach is such a blessing and a step in the right direction for any company planning to scale and grow.

What’s Next?

If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend setting up a coaching practice in your company. As I already mentioned, you don’t have to have a professional coach to do it, but for maximum effect, I’d encourage you to give a chance to someone who’s got the knowledge and experience to help you and your team move in the right direction.

If you’re not sure whether this would be the right approach for you and/or your company, you can start small: get a personal coach and test it for yourself. This will help you gain insight in the process and experience it on your own before deciding whether it is a good fit for your company.

Either way, give it a go. With a good coach, an impartial person you feel comfortable with and can trust, you can do incredible things. Still not sure? Well, you won’t know until you try.

The post How Can Coaching Improve Performance in the Workplace? appeared first on Snowation.