How to Coach and Mentor Employees in Today’s Landscape
The rise of remote/hybrid working has its benefits, but there’s also a dark side. In many ways, we’ve traded connection for convenience. A communal office gave employees the chance to collaborate face to face, chat over the watercooler, have impromptu meetings - all of which were a great way to observe and learn from more experienced staff.
With workers now tuning into the office virtually, it’s harder to find those organic mentoring moments. Today’s coaching requires a more formal, structured approach, alongside the right technology tools to facilitate communication.
Why mentoring matters
Coaching and mentoring are similar, but slightly different - coaching can be thought of as reaching for a goal, while mentoring is pushing an employee towards that goal. Both are necessary in a thriving workplace.
Guiding your employees in this way has multiple benefits:
- It improves employee engagement - employees report feeling 50% more engaged when involved in a mentoring program
- It boosts retention - employees who participate in mentoring programs are 49% less likely to leave their organization
- It increases productivity - 67% of businesses report an increase in productivity due to mentoring
- It enhances workplace culture - building trust and creating meaningful connections
- It encourages others - 89% of those mentored will go on to mentor others
Effective coaching is critical to fully realizing and developing the skills of employees and teams in the workplace, building a stronger workforce and creating future managers in the process. Coaching takes time and effort, but the results speak for themselves.
Great coaches have a way of empowering employees and inspiring them to work harder, smarter, and more productively than ever before, allowing your business to reach new heights.
How to coach and mentor effectively in a hybrid work environment
Mentoring and coaching are a little more difficult in a remote environment, but certainly not impossible. First, you’ll need the infrastructure to support your mentors and mentees.
This includes drawing up an organizational-wide strategy for developing and promoting mentorship opportunities, and honing in on what tech tools you’ll need to do that. Make sure your employees have everything they need to effectively communicate and collaborate. That could mean messaging apps, editing tools, project management software - talk to your team to get an idea of their needs and goals, identifying roadblocks and addressing them.
While mentoring, be careful to keep any criticism constructive, providing clear solutions and developing consistent guidelines for repeated tasks rather than micromanaging them every time. In this way, you can coach proactively - anticipating and addressing your employees’ needs before they voice them.
And don’t forget regular performance evaluations. Just because you can’t physically sit down with your employees, doesn’t mean you can’t give real-time feedback and have constructive conversations about their performance and goals.
You’ll need accurate data to conduct those assessments, monitoring your remote workers to ensure they’re managing their workload effectively and flagging any potential problems. Employee Productivity Monitoring solution Prodoscore is tailor-made for remote teams with unobtrusive monitoring that tracks how your employees are using core business applications.
Collecting this data allows managers to see at a glance when employees are struggling with their workload, becoming isolated, or headed for burnout. This level of visibility facilitates better mentoring by alerting team leaders to training gaps and waning productivity - signaling that an employee could benefit from one-on-one coaching.
Prodoscore seamlessly integrates with office suites like Google Workspace and Office 365, as well as CRM and communications tools such as Salesforce, Zoho CRM, RingCentral, and many others.
