What is a Coaching Form?
A coaching form is an essential tool that can help guide supervisors and managers conduct effective employee coaching sessions. Employee coaching templates allow leaders to document and keep track of the commitments made together with their direct reports to ensure they follow through and that the action plans align with company policies.
Importance
Workplace coaching is a vital element for cultivating employee productivity, engagement, and growth. It goes hand in hand with employee appraisal, serving as a guide to steer employees in the right direction to achieve their career goals.
This process involves not only feedback sessions but also action planning, follow-throughs, and documentation. It also requires a systematic approach to be effective, but this can sometimes get easily lost when managers are caught up with other tedious tasks.
A coaching form can help supervisors with this problem. With this tool, they can follow a solid framework and document their regular coaching sessions with employees. Having a record of these sessions allows them to easily track an employee’s progress against their goals, identify areas for growth, and continuously improve their performance.
Key Elements of an Employee Coaching Form
Employee coaching forms can vary depending on the purpose, goals, and industry settings. For example, a call center coaching form can differ from a manufacturing one. But the basic format of this tool consists of the following vital elements:
- Type of issue, concern, or incident – performance metrics, behavior or conduct, safety or work environment, customer service, rules and regulations, attendance, and others
- Description of the performance issue or concern – date and examples
- Action plan – specific solutions to address the issue
- Details for the follow-up session – review plan date and time
- Sign-off – name signature of employee and manager
5 Steps in Creating a Coaching Form
After knowing the key elements of a coaching form, you might ask yourself, “How do you create a coaching form?”
This section will provide a step-by-step guide for making your own coaching form.
1. Identify the type of concern or issue to discuss.
The first step in building a coaching form is to determine the type of problem to be addressed. Establishing this at the beginning of the form will set the expectations on what the manager and employee will look forward to during the coaching session.
Listed below are the types of issues that you can discuss:
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Employee conduct or behavior
- Attendance record
- Workplace safety or work environment
- Customer service
- Company rules and regulations
2. Describe the specific issue or concern in detail.
Once you’ve identified the type of issue, you must provide a comprehensive description of the case. You can use the following guide questions to specify details regarding the problem:
- What is the problem to be discussed?
- When and where did the issue occur?
- Who are the stakeholders involved in the issue?
- How long has it been occurring?
- Why and how did it happen?
3. Formulate action items to address the problem.
Action planning is an essential part of any coaching session. For this reason, managers should also include a section to outline the measures in addressing the issue being discussed during the session.
When discussing this section with the employee, make sure to provide actionable steps with clear outcomes aligned with their goals. Setting small, incremental targets with specific action items can go a long way for substantial improvement.
4. Set a follow-up session.
Coaching, as we know, is a continuous process. After all, change doesn’t occur overnight but requires consistent effort from both the mentor and the employee.
To make this work, it’s important to have follow-through sessions with the employee. These aim to track their progress, find which methods work (or not) for them, and make adjustments. Make sure to note the date and time of the follow-up session on the coaching form for documentation.
5. Complete the form with signatures.
Lastly, accountability is key when it comes to employee coaching. At the end of each session, the employee and manager should review the coaching form to clear out misunderstandings and ensure they’re on the same page. A signature from both parties verifies that they understand the terms and are on the same track with the goals of the coaching session.
Coaching Template Example
The example below shows what a coaching form looks like when completed in a digital format:
Coaching Form FAQs
A solid coaching plan should contain the following elements:
- Employee information
- Terms and agreement
- Goals and objectives
- Action plan(s)
- Tools and drivers for success
- Possible obstacles in reaching goals
- Progress and expected outcomes
- Follow-up session(s)
An effective coaching session should have the following components:
- A personalized approach to accommodate the individual needs of each employee
- A clear set of short-term and long-term goals based on the SMART methodology
- A comprehensive action plan to determine steps to achieve the goal and its expected outcomes
- A brief review of the employee’s takeaways and learnings for the session
Raise the level of your coaching sessions by asking the following questions:
- What would you like to focus on for this session?
- What is your ideal outcome for this goal?
- What benefits will you reap from achieving this goal?
- Have you taken steps to reach this goal?
- Which actions worked for your goal?
- Which measures could you have done differently?
- On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your progress towards achieving this goal?
- What are the potential roadblocks that you might face?
- How do you plan to work around these obstacles?
- What action items can you complete for this time frame (e.g., week, month, year)?
