HR’s Best Tool For Employee Development: Employee Coaching

11 tips for creating an effective employee coaching culture

Mentoring and coaching are two great ways to help employees grow and succeed. While both tools share the basic goals to increase employee performance and help employees reach their full potential—mentoring and coaching are very different.

Mentoring is usually done by someone who isn't the employee’s manager to help them learn about a new skill or an area of the business. Coaching on the other hand is the frequent, micro-moments that managers offer their employees to continue developing personally and professionally.

Coaching stands out as HR’s best tool for training and developing employees, because it’s so accessible and easy to establish organization-wide. But how do you make sure your efforts are effective?

Here are 11 tips for creating an effective employee coaching culture.

The most successful initiatives start at the top. Effective coaching must be modeled. Your leaders should prioritize these skills and set an example. They can do this by asking for frequent, 360 feedback and demonstrate their ability to receive feedback well.

Make coaching part of your organization’s culture from onboarding and performance reviews to everyday conversations. Ensure consistency by setting expectations around what effective employee coaching looks like in your organization, including:
 

Coaching isn’t a tool solely used for poor-performing employees. Every employee can benefit from frequent manager-employee meetings. But to be an effective employee learning and development tool, coaching needs to be implemented across the organization.

Without any guidance, feedback is likely to be given poorly by the coach and misconstrued by the employee. Support effective coaching in your organization by providing training and resources organization wide.

An immediate manager has the best visibility of an employee’s day-to-day progress and performance. They should have knowledge about not only what they’ve done well, but where they need to improve. When possible, managers can leverage 360 feedback or peer reviews to get a more detailed picture of employee performance.

Each coaching session should be centered around an employee’s performance. Managers should ask questions about the successes and failures of their most recent projects. Understanding what went well and what needs improvement, can equip managers with the information necessary to help employees improve.

A detailed agenda gives your coaching sessions structure and consistency. Use a one-on-one agenda template in each session to discuss goals, obstacles, opportunities, and decisions. Make sure employees are included in the process and contribute their own ideas and topics of discussion. This will increase engagement during the meeting and improve the likelihood of achieving desired outcomes decided upon in the meeting.

Effective coaching sessions need to be ongoing and frequent. Why? More frequent conversations mean more opportunities to uncover obstacles and boost performance. In fact, when Adobe switched from annual performance reviews to frequent 1:1s, it saw a 30% reduction in voluntary turnover. GE did the same and saw a 5x increase in productivity.

The manager-directed coaching sessions are a way of the past. Employees want to be a part of the conversation so they can understand how to improve. Our research found that 71% of employees prefer immediate feedback, even if it’s negative. Ask employees how they view their performance, what growth opportunities interest them, and where they should focus on improving.

The best resource you can take into an employee coaching conversation is notes from your last coaching session. Find a way to document conversations so each meeting builds off the last. Make notes easily accessible to both parties so employees can consume and act in their own time.

Leverage the tools and technology available to you to adopt and engage in an effective coaching culture. Whether you utilize career pathing, one-on-one meeting software, or even word documents and filing systems, coaching tools and technology will make each session less complicated.

Follow these tips for more effective employee coaching to help you grow and develop your people, boost engagement and performance, and impact team and business success.