Coaching in Context: Elevating the Coaching Experience

Coaching is an important element in every organization and helps to foster and accelerate onboarding, training, and development processes. Coaching also builds and solidifies relationships, creating team and company loyalty and increasing employee motivation and retention. And in this time of shifting employee expectations, employees want a continuous feedback loop, with frequent coaching and feedback and to receive actionable next steps.  

But the coaching experience is often less than optimal for managers and doesn’t 100% align with employee expectations. In fast-paced environments (especially those with large teams) offering the right amount of coaching for everyone on a daily basis can be impossible.  

The coaching experience should be simple, efficient, and actionable. Contextual coaching is an excellent way to stay in-the-moment with employees, regardless of team size or time constrictions. There are many opportunities to coach agents within the flow of work, and in this article, we’ll cover the concept of contextual coaching (or micro-coaching), its impact, and creating a smooth, efficient, and modern experience for managers. 

Coaching for Impact 

Contextual coaching is exactly what it sounds like. Micro coaching helps managers deliver timely, in-the-moment coaching “tidbits” quickly and easily so that employees have the feedback that they need, when they need it.  

Let’s say that an agent on a large team is struggling, their manager doesn’t have the bandwidth to speak with them at the time of need. The agent will continue to make the same error until the manager is able to address the problem and recommend actionable next steps – and that could take days. And even then, this conversation might not be as productive as it could be if the manager has to spend a lot of time going through disparate data points to prepare, or if they aren’t able to quickly identify actionable next steps for improvement.  

But it can be easier for the manager. Let’s take a look at the micro-coaching experience on the Centrical platform.  

Contextual Coaching with Centrical 

The Centrical platform provides a simple, efficient process and “single pane of glass” that enables and empowers team leaders to better help employees grow and thrive than through traditional coaching methods. Team leaders can send employees coaching based on their KPI performance, their missions, or general coaching. Employees can then acknowledge their receipt of a coaching action, confirm completion, and communicate back to their manager all in one place.  

Here is a quick overview of the capability: 

• Managers can initiate micro-coaching in the flow of work 
• Coaching actions are tied to a specific KPI result, learning mission, insight, or general micro-coaching 
• Pre-defined coaching templates (which can be customized for your company’s messaging and brand) provide a framework for managers to build from 
• Can help supplement, document, or provide the next best step after a 1:1 coaching meeting 

Below is a peek at what this looks like: 

Sending Coaching Actions: The Manager Experience 

Coaches should have flexibility to send the right kind of coaching feedback, and to personalize it. On our platform, managers can choose a coaching template and write a personal message to the employee. There are three types of coaching templates (performance coaching, learning coaching, and general coaching) which will appear based on where the manager is sending the action from: 

• Manager Insights when there is a drop in performance 
• Team Performance page while reviewing individual and team results in a KPI 
• Team Missions while reviewing someone’s learning completion, success, or lack thereof 
• Team Leaderboard while noticing how someone is performing overall compared to the team 
• The Employee Performance & Learning Dashboard while reviewing how just one person is doing, perhaps before or after a 1:1 meeting 

Below is a glimpse at what this might look like: 

Receiving Coaching: The Employee Experience 

Acting on coaching recommendations and next steps is just as easy for the employee as it is for their coach. When an employee receives a new coaching action, they’ll get a notification with the manager’s personal message. The process is simple and fully transparent – the employee first acknowledges receipt of the action, then marks it as completed once finished. If they want, the employee can then send their manager a note of their own to close the feedback loop.  

Below is a look at the process. 

One-to-Many Coaching 

Leaders have tight bandwidth, and time is precious. So, the Centrical platform enables a one-to-many coaching function, allowing leaders to not only send micro-coaching in bulk but leverage coaching actions to send meeting notes and action items to team members. This helps leaders save time and bring coaching and follow-ups to scale.  

Why Contextual Coaching? 

As we’ve mentioned in our examples, contextual coaching provides smaller coaching actions within the flow of work and in the moment of need, making the overall process more effective and efficient.  

For instance, closing the loop on a coaching action sometimes takes a little too long. A user might miss a message from their manager. Or, they might have read it, but they have questions and need time for a follow up discussion – and now the message and recommended action have fallen through the cracks.  

With contextual coaching conversations, the Centrical platform provides a single place for managers and employees to reach out to one another within context. So, if a manager, for instance, sees that an employee hasn’t followed up on a coaching action, the manager can easily follow up with a quick note. If the employee hasn’t completed the action because they have questions, they can ask the question and receive their answer as part of that conversation in the platform, without taking their question to Teams or Slack, or having to tap their managers on the shoulder for a face-to-face.  

Analysis 

The manager console includes pre-built reporting for the manager and a birds-eye view of all coaching conversations. From, here, team leaders can see various analytics and measure success, including: 

• All coaching actions that have discussions (supervisor view only) 
• Employee progression 
• Who is being coached  
• What they are being coaching on  
• Teams that are being coached, and comparisons (more, less coaching) 

In short, the coaching console offers a two-way communication channel for managers and employees to communicate within the context of coaching (setting the team up for success) and measuring that impact and success with analytics around those actions.  

Summary and Takeaways 

Coaching is critical, but the process isn’t aways effective or easy on the manager. And the highly effective method of contextual coaching, or micro-coaching can be tough to achieve without the right tools. The Centrical platform address this challenge with a simplified and personalized process for both managers and employees: 

• In a fast-paced environment and with big teams, it is tough for managers to deliver the right amount of coaching when it is needed  
• Employee expectations are changing, and they want continuous feedback, delivered often and accompanied by actionable next steps 
• Centrical provides a space for manager and team members to communicate actions and questions/follow-ups in one place, instead of having to communicate via other channels 
• Managers have the flexibility to quickly and efficiently send the right coaching actions with a selection of templates, and can make it personal with notes to employees 
• Employees can easily acknowledge receipt of these actions, mark them as completed, and send a note of their own as part of the feedback loop 
• Managers can save time and bring coaching and recognition to scale with the one-to-many coaching capability 
• The console offers managers an overall view of coaching 

While good coaching is a powerful tool, it must be part of a holistic approach that includes elements such as targeted microlearning, real-time performance management, and other capabilities with a gamified approach. For over a decade, Centrical has provided a holistic and effective approach to workforce engagement management to leading companies across the globe. To learn more about how our coaching capabilities work in tandem with other elements to deliver meaningful results, have a quick preview to see our platform in action, and schedule your personalized demo today.