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Best practices for manager coaching

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Important

This article is for the legacy Workplace Analytics app and does not reflect functionality available on the updated Viva Insights platform. Access current documentation for Viva Insights advanced insights here: advanced insights documentation.

Employees who get one-on-one time with their managers are more likely to be engaged as compared to those who don't. When managers are needed in more meetings than they can attend, they become obstacles to team goal attainment and create bottlenecks in decision making.

Why it matters

According to the research referenced in What great managers do daily:

  • "A Gallup study found that at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores is driven by who the boss is."
  • "The opportunity is huge for better-run organizations and a higher quality of life for workers."
  • "Bad management is estimated to cost the U.S. economy up to $398 billion annually."

According to Five ways to empower your team to make decisions: “Employee empowerment is directly tied to results. A study by Zenger Folkman found 4 percent of employees are willing to put in more effort when empowerment is low, while 67 percent are willing to go above and beyond when empowerment is high.”

According to How to make your one-on-ones with employees more productive the level of day-to-day collaboration between managers and their employees can indicate whether employees feel empowered to take initiative and work independently, or if they struggle to separate themselves from their manager.

  • A proportionately high number of hours spent in meetings with managers suggests micro-management.
  • Too little time spent with managers in meetings potentially suggests insufficient team guidance, particularly for new employees.

Best practices

  • Schedule recurring 1:1 meetings with your direct reports for 30 minutes at least twice a month and hold them accountable for achieving that goal. Consistent one-on-one manager time with employees leads to more positive employee engagement.
  • Prepare and remain flexible on discussion points in 1:1s. 1:1s are best with structure but not too much to allow for co-creation. Agree on discussion points at the start and allocate adequate time to the most important topics.
  • Lead by example. People are more engaged if they work for a manager who is working at least as much as they are.
  • Evenly distribute work. Highly utilized employees often work longer hours than their peers, which can lead to disengagement.
  • Maintain large internal networks across the company. Employees with larger networks than their manager are more likely to view leadership unfavorably. (In order to qualify as a connection in Viva Insights, an employee must interact with another person at least two times per month in an email or meeting with five or fewer participants.)
  • Empower employees with ownership of work streams so decisions can be made at the level where immediate action can be taken.
  • Enable and use Insights to manage your calendar and increase your awareness of conflicting meetings and meetings that keep you informed of decisions.
  • Promptly decline meetings as soon as possible with a brief explanation of why to reinforce decision-making roles and to role model healthy habits.

Change strategies

Reduce coattended meetings

Meetings where an employee and their manager are both attending can signify a lack of delegation. These meetings are a good starting point to deciding what decisions can be delegated to reduce coattendance. For example, to get started:

  • Identify meetings that are attended by a manager and an employee that reports directly to that manager to uncover decision-making themes.
  • Define decision-making rights and have managers commit to declining meetings where their attendance is unnecessary.
  • Recap delegated decisions during recurring one-on-ones to ensure alignment and report progress.

Develop a 1:1 conversation series

Use the following meeting agenda outline as a guide for creating a series of 1:1 meetings with your employees to help them be more empowered, remembering to keep questions open-ended to spark discussions.

  • Meeting 1: Share some positive feedback with your employee.
  • Meeting 2: Explore how your employee interacts with the rest of the team.
  • Meeting 3: Understand what your employee likes and dislikes about the job.
  • Meeting 4: Define their assigned tasks and help them set priorities.
  • Meeting 5: Ask how your employee wants to grow in the future.
  • Meeting 6: Create space for your employee to share candid feedback and set short-term growth goals.

Identify and utilize influencer teams

Utilize Viva Insights to identify influencer groups or teams and leverage their network to share ideas, knowledge, and habits. The following are some ways to do so:

  • Leverage influencer groups to quickly disseminate information across the organization.
  • Identify projects that highlight the importance of influencers and use them as examples of how influencers can be used to quickly connect disparate teams.
  • Ask the influencers to share a similar message and to encourage their colleagues to connect with someone new.

Viva Insights best practices