Coaching your employees is a great way to approach improving both the individual performance of your employees and the overall performance of your business. However, some companies still seem to question whether the investment in a performance coaching programme is cost effective. Centric HR is here to explain how coaching can improve performance within the workplace, including what the key steps are to performance coaching.
So, how does coaching improve performance in the workplace? Coaching employees guides employees with clear steps they need to take in order to reach particular goals and can be tailored to each individual employee’s needs; therefore resulting in progression. It is a method used to help employees feel less overwhelmed by the requirement for improved performance.
Keep reading to find out more about the benefits of performance coaching, as well as how performance coaching can improve teamwork.
Employee coaching aims to improve performance in the workplace by focusing on specific skills and goals to make progress seem more achievable to employees. Quite often, as part of the performance coaching process, employees will experience improvements in other areas of their life, such as their ability to socialise, or in their overall self- confidence. For example, if an employee needs support in managing their stress whilst at work, then performance coaching can support them in reaching this goal.
Coaching performance would provide employees with useful strategies, KPIs and bespoke feedback for ways to reach their goals in the workplace, e.g. stress levels. This in itself, would have a significant impact on an employee’s performance in the workplace, because they would be able to handle the day-to-day stresses that inevitably occur without the quality of their work being affected.
However, employee coaching isn’t necessarily required to improve one specific area of an employee’s performance. In some cases, it can support employees with reaching their full potential. This can be quite useful for employees that are new to the industry and just need some support in refining certain areas of their performance. A performance coach will assess an employee’s skills from an outside perspective, providing constructive feedback and tools that will help them to reach their full potential.
It is important to note that not every employee will respond positively to the same type of employee coaching, therefore utilising the various different steps is key to producing the best outcome.
One of the most important steps to performance coaching is to listen to each employee. This not only makes the employee feel valued and understood, but also helps you to determine exactly where they need more support. Without genuinely listening to the employee it would be difficult to fully understand their areas for improvement and tailor a bespoke plan to each individual.
Finding a balance between the level to which you challenge an employee, whilst also providing support, is also key to generating improvement in performance. Being too challenging can make employees feel overwhelmed, which can negatively impact their performance, however being too supportive and sympathetic can encourage them to feel too comfortable in their current position and not motivated towards change.
Establishing key performance indicators for the employee being coached is key to helping them progress with their performance. A key performance indicator is a way of tracking and measuring a goal that someone is working towards. By establishing these with the employee, you communicate what is expected of them and by when. From this point you can determine who they are going to achieve this. This not only provides them with a roadmap for improvement but also makes them accountable for their own targets.
Performance coaching is designed to help employees achieve a multitude of goals that contribute to how well they do their job and the overall performance of the business. However, there are some overriding benefits that make investing in performance coaching more than worthwhile. We have detailed them below.
By engaging in a performance coaching programme, an employee can develop a stronger sense of resilience. This is because they will prove to themselves that they can overcome certain difficulties, such as having low confidence. This can then be translated into their everyday attitude towards work, including how they make business decisions. Therefore, simply working on some personal goals can lead to improvement of the business overall just through learning some helpful lessons.
Another benefit of engaging outperformance coaching is that employees will be more focused on creating targets for improvement. Whilst these may originate from targets set to improve their personal goals, the mindset of creating SMART targets is applicable to all aspects of business. If employees apply this mindset to the running of a business, it can make the direction of a business seem a lot clearer and more achievable. With clear direction in place, the business is going to run alot smoother.
Increased employee engagement is another benefit of providing employee coaching to your business. As a result of receiving bespoke support and training, employees will feel an increased sense of value towards the business and will be more willing to give back. This can result in increased motivation and engagement towards working harder to achieve business goals. What’s more, employees may even seem happier in the work they are completing because they feel valued.
Employee coaching can also improve employee engagement because staff will be looking to apply the practices they have set in their SMART targets to their work. For example, if one of your employees’ targets is to improve their stress levels when working, they may be advised to do 3 minute meditation activities when they feel overwhelmed. This can improve their engagement because the meditations help them to return to a clear and motivated mindset, which therefore improves the quality of their work.
If you are interested in reading more about employee engagement, take a look at our recent blog by clicking here.
By applying a performance coaching strategy to your business, studies have shown that a business’ competitiveness and performance can be improved in the following ways:
Therefore it is clear to see that performance coaching not only improves performance on an individual level for employees but it can also improve the overall performance in a workplace too.
Performance coaching is a great way to improve teamwork within a business. This is because it creates a stronger sense of self-awareness between employees. Through creating a better sense of self-awareness, employees become more aware of how their involvement affects the team overall and this cycle is applied to everyone within the team. As a result, each employee begins to communicate more effectively between each other and ensure they work hard enough to justify their participation in the team.
Not only that, through performance coaching, employees learn to recognise the importance of rewarding achievements and providing feedback. This means that they will begin to do this within a team, and even begin to ask for feedback from each other. This can result in a more effective team of employees who work together and actively review their processes to seek improvements, which is a great way to improve the overall performance of the business.
Centric HR are experienced HR Consultants in Staffordshire and Birmingham. Our team is here to support you with your HR strategies to ensure that your organisation runs successfully. We can also help you with running employee coaching programmes to support employees in reaching their full potential and improve particular skills such as communication, confidence and decrease their stress levels.
Get in touch with us today to learn more about our HR Consultancy and Employee Coaching Programme, and how we can help your business.
