Why Is Coaching Important In The Workplace? Types And Techniques

Before understanding the importance of coaching in the workplace or office, let’s ask ourselves why coaching is even important for, let’s say, sports.

There would be ample benefits like coaching can help athletes achieve their potential and perform well on the ground.

Similarly, coaching in the workplace helps employees to upskill and achieve their maximum potential, which can be useful for their careers and the company’s growth.

In this article, we will explain Coaching Techniques in the Workplace and their benefits, but first, let’s understand what workplace coaching is!

?️Why Is Coaching Important In The Workplace?

Goal Setting

Setting an achievable, relevant, and time-bound goal is an important aspect of a professional career. Coaching helps you set SMART goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

It can help you and your teammates to achieve common goals by staying focused, consistent and team-spirit

Increases Productivity

Coaching employees is a productive way of increasing engagement among them, and they get purpose and direction to work towards their set goals,

And accomplishing goals equals greater productivity which in turn benefits the organization.

Develops Skills

Coaching helps in developing both technical and soft skills that are vital for development in a career.

Technical skills may include hardcore tech stacks required in your day-to-day job. In contrast, soft skills include developing qualities like communication, conflict resolution, and problem-solving, which may make employees better team players.

Creates Future Leaders

Coaching can help organizations teach leadership skills to their junior staff, which can help them withstand future responsibilities.

A typical management-level employee must have skills like clear vision, managing stress, keeping the team together, and making firm decisions.

Coaching helps employees develop these skills and be useful for the organization for future roles.

Improves Engagement

Coaching helps employees engage more and promotes participation; this helps boost employees’ confidence and improves retention rates in the organization. 

Also, when employee engagement increases, it opens the door to more ideas and discussion, which paves the way to a more productive and healthy environment. 

?Types of Workplace Coaching

Workplace coaching is usually part of the company’s learning and development program, which is intended to work on areas for improvement and reinforce strengths to maintain the progress of the employee’s performance. 

There are various types of workplace coaching available, some of them being:

Executive Coaching

It is one of the most widely used coaching meant for leaders of an organization or for the individuals at top management who control one or more portfolios or verticals to foster business or interpersonal changes that may hinder growth.

Team Coaching 

This type of coaching helps foster team bonds and collaboration to improve output and individual growth.

It revolves around improving team dynamics and team accountability.

Cognitive coaching

 It works toward improving interpersonal and decision-making skills to broaden an employee’s cognitive ability and promote creativity.

It tends to boost confidence and productivity in an employee.

Adaptive coaching

 It is one of the best approaches to coaching, which tends to bring out the best in every employee based on each individual’s distinct traits.

?Key Workplace Coaching Techniques

In today’s knowledge-based economy, there is no doubt that employees are the most important asset for an organization.

For an organization to be successful, the employees must be properly skilled and trained to be more capable and productive.

Here are some of the best handpicked effective techniques that can be used to coach:

Pre-Session Check-in 

This is one of the basic yet important techniques for coaching. It acts as a brochure that can tell various things about the employee “Why do they want the training?, What does their goal-setting process look like?” what are their interests/hobbies?” or “Where do they want to see themselves in the next five years?

This can be done by sending them a questionnaire which can be as simple as a Google form. These questionnaires can also be sent after the training sessions to keep track of things.

With the help of these check-ins, mentors can know more about their mentees, and suitable coaching can be provided.

For instance, if an employee struggles with pitching ideas or working in front of clients, the next session can be scheduled for communication.

Setting Up Goals

It is one of the most important parts of professional coaching; it helps track employees’ progress and makes them feel accountable.

This can be achieved by setting “smart” goals from time to time, i.e., time-bound and measurable goals.

Setting goals helps direct the learning journey and provides challenges, instilling the ability to think outside the box.

Challenging their Thinking 

Effective training means training employees how to do a task and teaching them how to think dynamically, prioritize and strategize.

It involves giving them the liberty, to some extent, to bring some changes in the process flow and not always follow the old-school way of working.

Innovation comes with risk, so they must know when to make the right decisions and what risks are worth taking. This is where challenging thinking comes into play.

For instance, if an employee skips any step in a task to save some time. Meanwhile, this action may cause a problem in future

.A mentor can challenge the thinking by telling him/her the consequences

Emotional Intelligence 

Emotional intelligence in the workplace is very important as it describes the ability of employees to understand others’ emotions and properly react to them to maintain a good and friendly ecosystem at the workplace.

Managers or coaches should focus on maintaining emotional intelligence, coping with challenges, making decisions, and achieving desired results.

Journaling

Journaling is one of the important techniques in workplace coaching. It is nothing about one’s feelings, thoughts, or insecurities. It is quite possible that an employee may not be comfortable speaking up aloud. Writing down things may help in these situations and can pave the way for potential solutions.

For instance, if an employee has conflicts with his/her manager, journaling may be a more comfortable way to express feelings rather than speaking out.

Coaches can also actuate mentees to maintain a work journal in which they can keep track of day-to-day tasks, goals, and achievements.  

Timely Follow-Up Feedback

It is one of the most effective coaching techniques as it allows the coach to know about the effectiveness of the sessions and also about the shortcomings that can be improved in the future.

It also creates room for two-way communication, enhancing the program’s productivity.

Feedback can be in emails, forms, text messages, or any other means of communication.

Building Confidence

A confident employee always acts as a great asset to the organization. Confidence allows them to be more productive and more fearless of consequences. They are more likely to step out of their comfort zone and deal with challenges with more stability rather than getting intimidated by them.

A valued employee tends to be more confident. However, this can be done in a variety of ways.

Giving positive feedback: Many times, employees are not aware of hidden talents they might have, like good communication, team leading, etc. Praising them for their abilities would boost their confidence.

Celebrating milestones and achievements: When employees perform well or have a work anniversary, they should be praised.

Respond positively to mistakes. Making mistakes is a common human trait, so employee mistakes should be taken positively. This will reflect the organization’s confidence in its employees.

Accountability

Creating a culture of accountability is very important in an organization. It not only boosts the performance of employees but also reduces the chances of a blame game in case of any escalation.

Accountability can be cultivated within employees with various steps like

Assigning ownerships: Whenever a new project starts, it is important to assign an owner who would be responsible for the completion of a task by a given date and will also keep track of progress

Setting team goals: While working on a project, it is good to have a shared team goal to keep accountability in check on each other

A coach’s job is to convey the importance of accountability to the employees and help them inculcate this quality

Stress Management:

Stress management techniques or relaxation techniques are also vital in workplace training as it helps employees to reduce stress and stay calm and healthy during work. Training employees on maintaining stress levels during work is necessary for any employee-centric or employee-friendly organization.

Coaches can help employees to lead ways to become stress-free, some of them being:

• Deep breathing exercises: Taking deep breaths can help the body intake more oxygen and can calm the thoughts

• Doodling: Doodling can help one’s mind to relax and can act as a decoy to the present situation 

• A small walk: Taking a short walk around the block can act welcoming to distraction and can refresh one’s mood

Personality and Skill Assessments:

Personality and skills assessments can help coaches or mentors to know their mentees better. They can be coached in a specific way according to their personality and skill set.

Various profiling tools are readily available in the market and are being used by top industries to profile their employees.

?FAQs

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