Ensuring effective virtual coaching

For most businesses that have managed to survive during this pandemic and are able to work from home, an additional challenge is to keep track of employees—their work output and motivation. But since many tasks have migrated online, we’d all have to refine how we monitor and engage our employees.

We asked Dino Badilla, our resource person on leadership, what we’d need to adjust to ensure we’re still effective at coaching and mentoring our teams.

His recommendations are:

1. Increase frequency of communication, engagement and feedback with remote teams

Establish new ways of channels and interaction to keep the engagement high. As managers, our teams expect that we foster connectivity and are ready to listen to them in these uncertain times. Since the start of this health crisis, the negativity, tiredness and anxieties are so high in many offices. More time must be spent actively listening, coaching and designing a plan to respond to the remote needs of employees as they adjust and become productive in this new work setup.

2. Regular conversations on priorities, motivation and morale boost

Maintain productivity and drive value among your team by consistent encouragement on goals, resilience and organizational performance. In most companies these days, online platforms have made it possible for leaders to connect through the divide and the distance. Timely responses to queries and simplifying complex processes without compromising established office guidelines encourages remote teams to approach tasks with professionalism and a positive attitude.

3. Provide creative learning sessions to sustain and equip your remote team

It is important to ensure that our team members continuously learn new skills or retool their mentoring and coaching skills so that they can deliver quality output and productive oversight over their subordinates and projects. Once a week, I have set a “Lunch and Learn” schedule for my team so that we can learn new skills together while having our own work day lunches.

More than ever, companies should invest on their managers’ coaching skills and competencies to manage performance of remote teams. Coaching inspires trust among employees. Adapting to this changing environment can be very stressful to our people. A coaching mind-set shall facilitate learning, flexibility and agility in driving focused teams to achieving powerful outcomes and better performance during this global health crisis.

Badilla will conduct a virtual workshop on “Coaching Skills for High Productivity: Developing a Coaching Culture in Your Organization” on Sept. 17-18, 2020. INQ

For more information about the workshop and schedule of online courses offered by the Inquirer Academy, please email [email protected], or call (0945) 2158935 and look for Jerald Miguel.