The Coaching Insights You Didn't Know You Needed

Do you know your workforce? Like, really know how your employees perceive their strengths and weaknesses? These insights form the backbone of an effective talent management strategy, but they can be hard to garner.  

While many in the learning and development field know the transformational results of digital coaching — things like deeper employee engagement, improved interpersonal skills and increased productivity — few know about its potential to deliver data-driven insights on your workforce’s strengths, weaknesses and development opportunities.

Here’s how it typically works: Before matching coachees with their ideal coaches, digital coaching solutions provide a self-assessment that helps learners identify their strengths, areas for development and, ultimately, coaching goals. The platform aggregates this data, populating HR dashboards with completely confidential but highly insightful information on your workforce.

Of course, not all digital coaching solutions provide these data-driven insights or, even more critically, handle personal information with the privacy it deserves. In fact, many platforms do not even meet EU standards on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), let alone System and Organization Controls (SOC2). Some digital providers even secretly record calls. 

And this discrepancy in data usage and privacy will likely increase as the digital coaching industry continues to expand and new, potentially less trustworthy, coaching vendors enter the market.

To find a vendor that can optimize your coaching investment, examine these variables:

Quality digital coaching solutions tailor their programs to meet each learner and organization’s unique needs. And the key to personalizing learning journeys at scale is data. Responses to comprehensive self-assessment questions help coaching solutions identify ideal matches between coaches and coachees. 

This data serves another purpose for the best coaching solutions on the market — it provides high-level workforce insights. Tech-forward coaching solutions aggregate and anonymize data to help HR teams see the overall workforce’s strengths, weaknesses and goals. 

Through the dashboard you can learn things like, have you established a caring culture where wellbeing is at the forefront? Do your employees need leadership development? Do you need to build organizational resilience? 

Some analytics dashboards also measure how coaches are working on these focus areas and progressing toward their established goals. In other words, graphics show how coaching programs are impacting the organization as a whole. And they measure the employee experience, continuously updating metrics on user feedback and platform usage. 

By checking the dashboard, you know if your employees are changing perspectives, activating existing strengths and finding new, productive solutions. And you understand how satisfied they are with their coaches and their own personal and professional development.

Again, not all coaching platforms provide such robust HR dashboards. To figure out how (or if) coaching solutions use workforce data, you can ask these five questions:
 

At a minimum, digital coaching solutions should create psychologically safe spaces, meaning coaching conversations should remain confidential. This confidentiality cultivates the trust, openness and honesty required for productive one-on-one sessions. It is also business-critical to protect commercially sensitive information. In fact, only under potentially dangerous circumstances or illegality should coaches ever disclose the contents of their conversations. 
 
When delivered through digital means, coaching demands even more stringent confidentiality. Not only must conversations remain private, but coaching vendors must also keep all digital information secure, following basic standards like ISO27001 and meeting the industry SOC2 standard. 
 
Most enterprises agree that increased data calls for increased data security, but these practices still vary widely in the digital coaching industry. Consequently, you should look for a coaching vendor that provides information on team development and robust evidence of impact, but never reveals details about specific individuals. The coaching platform should also guarantee full data protection.  
 
You can investigate a vendor’s data security by asking these five questions:
 

Of course, while data can uncover indispensable learning and development insights, coaches themselves are at the heart of all digital coaching solutions. And a provider’s bench of coaches warrants a thorough examination — especially in the highly unregulated coaching industry. Partner with providers that overcorrect for a lack of regulations, setting a high bar for their coaches. You can’t go wrong with a provider that employs individuals with diverse industry knowledge and credentials from the world’s most renowned coaching bodies, EMCC Global or the International Coaching Federation (ICF). 
 
The learning and development of coaches should not stop at qualifications though. Just like learners, coaches can and should receive personal and professional support, through coaching supervision. An investment in the coaches themselves continually improves their services and means they likely follow the latest coaching standards and guidelines.
 
Along with coaching standards, examine potential vendors’ coaching models. Confirm they take a proven, scientific approach to their curriculums and that coaches are capable of supporting those frameworks.
 
You can ask these five questions to determine the overall quality of a vendor’s coaching services:
 

 
As enterprises respond to both tightening budgets and increasing demand for learning and development programs, HR teams must maximize their corporate coaching investments. These 15 audit questions can help. To deliver on the tremendous promise of digital coaching, HR teams should select a solution that provides — and protects — robust data-driven insights while equipping every employee with personalized coaching that’s rooted in scientific research and delivered by supported, competent coaches.