Coaching for performance improvement? ABSOLUTELY! We are super excited to share a new feature in the Snowfly Employee Engagement suite of tools: Coaching!
Such a small word that can carry a massive impact to your organization, your team, and to each individual you work with.
We put a lot of thought into the Coaching toolset. Part of that is in a simple interface for the coach (usually a manager) and coachee (usually an individual contributor) so that neither feel like they need to learn a new, sophisticated software package. But there’s a lot of intentional design and flow that is underneath the simplicity of the user interface to ensure that Coaching is one of the most important, most powerful tools each of your managers has to actually and really help each person on their team.
Coaching for Performance Improvement vs. Discipline
One of the problems with developing a performance improvement plan (PIP) is that it feels like whoever has a PIP is in trouble. Sometimes, they are. They might have a deadline where, if they don’t fulfil the requirements of the PIP, they will be formally disciplined or terminated. Rare is the person who has a PIP and feels like they are doing well in their job.
Contrast a PIP for performance improvement to coaching for performance improvement. When you have a principle-based, mentor-like coaching environment, the employee feels support from the coach and the organization. They feel like the organization is willing to invest in them, and will work with them to make improvements that will ultimately make them more valuable in their role.
Everyone wants to feel successful in their role. You do, I do, and the team member who continues to miss milestones and deadlines wants to feel successful. Sometimes, all we need is a little direction, encouragement, hence, a little coaching.
Managers who work as effective coaches help their coachee feel like they are in a collaborative relationship. That is, they don’t feel like they are alone, rather they are working towards improvement with someone who wants them to succeed, and will take steps to help them succeed. Instead of a coach telling someone to do five things, they might help them with on-the-job training, education, shadowing, counseling, etc.
Collaboration means you work together, which is a real manifestation that you, and your organization, values the employee. How powerful!
You want to use Coaching for performance improvement, not necessarily for disciplinary reasons. Coaching is optimized to help your employees improve performance, which will also improve employee engagement.
The Snowfly Coaching solution provides the perfect communication environment for the coach and coachee to collaborate. Each person can make notes, action items, and comments in the Coaching system. This provides a high level of transparency that is appreciated by each party as they both work together for performance improvement. The coachee is not left wondering what the coach is thinking, and the coach can make their thoughts very clear in the Coaching system.
It’s important to note that this transparency extends to the coach, the coachee, and any admins authorized to access it, but not people who don’t have permission. Some of the things in coaching conversations could be sensitive or embarrassing.
Because the need for individual performance improvement could be identified by a multitude of sources, Snowfly Coaching allows either an individual contributor OR a supervisor to start a coaching process. Because Snowfly has other employee performance and employee engagement data, including data used in the Rewards and Recognition systems, your admins can set up triggers that will suggest an employee needs to start a Coaching process.
For example, if an employee continually misses a key metric, the system can automatically alert an admin or supervisor so they can start a coaching relationship. We have admin tools that make it easy to set these thresholds up. Can you imagine an automated system that says:
We can see this employee’s wrap time is outside of the norm for 3 months. You need to do a coaching on this.
Of course, the manager could justify not coaching the employee for a variety of reasons, but the automation, the triggering of this, is really powerful. If Snowfly has access to your KPIs, or use our API to interface with your data/metrics, we can spin up a coaching relationship anytime someone’s metrics are below a threshold.
Amazing.
The quality of documentation that goes into Coaching is important. Using the Snowfly Coaching tools gives you a clear history of the coaching process, at each step, and confirmation or acknowledgement by the coachee. Miscommunication can be minimized when each party can enter information, and access whatever is entered into the Coaching tool. This also gives trainers a great insight into how they can improve coaching and mentoring in your organization.
We’ll share more about our new Coaching tools over the next few months. We’d love to get on a demo and show you how it works. Remember, we built this so it’s easy to use for both coach and coachee. When you are a demo, make sure to ask about what’s happening behind the scenes that make this one of the most powerful tools your managers will have access to.
Contact Us for a demo here and learn how Coaching for performance improvement can help your organization
