Employee Performance: Tips for Fastracking Employee Development with Coaching

Introduction

After the coaching session, you have a charged up employee, who is ready to take on his or her improvement areas

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Many times, I’ve noticed somewhere along the line, working on improvements gets hidden in piles of other project work. Eventually, the employee tends to focus on project work or simply loses interest and lets action items slide away into the oblivion, only to emerge in the next coaching session. You can avoid this from happening and make sure your employee’s performance is as per expected by applying these points.

This is the last article in the Employee Coaching series. For more on employee performance and development, refer to An Employee Coaching Checklist: Before the Session.

Though the manager is responsible for conducting coaching sessions and helping in employee development, it is the onus of the employee to develop him or herself. If this sense of ownership is not present, then as a manager, you should first install it. Only then progress to other aspects of employee development.

After the Coaching Session Activities

Employee development actually takes place after the employee coaching session. To ensure enhanced employee performance, the focus should always be on action items discussed in during the employee coaching session. The following list contains key items that you need to implement after the session:

• Circulate Employee Coaching Meeting Notes and Employee Development Plan: Send meeting notes and share the employee development plan with the employee. The plan must include training, scheduled checkpoints, and milestones. Treat the employee development plan as any other project plan. You can ask the employee to document risks and develop risk mitigation strategies.The plan provides specific activities that the employee needs to take to ensure performance is as per set expectations.

• Training: Training, be it formal or informal, is an intricate part employee development. Training also plays a significant role in fast tracking performance. However, not all training is effective. This is especially true for training that is not supported by other post-training initiatives. For training to invoke behavior change, post-training activities and follow-ups are necessary. For example, if your team member has attended training on presentation skills, the employee may simply not apply the principles taught in the training at the work place. This actually the training is a waste. As a Manager, you need to review the employee presentations to see whether the principles taught are being transferred in the work place.

Best Practice: Conduct regular post-training checkpoints to ensure skills taught are applied and not forgotten.

• Monitoring: In the coaching plan, make sure you have documented checkpoints. Always monitor progress against the coaching plan by observing behavior and measuring against a baseline. The information you gather will be useful in your next coaching checkpoint or session. If you spot the performance is not as expected, don’t wait till the next coaching session. Simply, have a discussion with the employee. Change in employee behavior can take time. Many times the employee simply forgets and needs to be reminded. Apart from reminders and close monitoring, employee need support.

• Support: Most people fail in ventures, start-ups, and their career because they do not have a support system in place. The purpose of a support system is to encourage the employee and help them achieve the set expectations and goals. The support system can be a colleagues and the manager. To succeed in employee development, managers needs to build a rapport and a trusting relationship with the employee.This is also true during the employee coaching session.

• Motivation: Make sure you consistently keep an eye on the employee’s motivation. Have a system of rewards and recognitions in place that develop extrinsic motivation. In addition, make sure the employee is intrinsically motivated by giving him or her work that is challenging and relevant to him. Sometimes the employee benefits and perks offered by an organization affect motivation and hence employee development and employee performance.

References

Image credit: SXC

The content of this article is from the personal experience of the author.