How to Measure the Impact of Coaching

CoffeeChat uses a series of touch points throughout the coaching journey to ensure participants and their company see tangible results

How CoffeeChat Helps Measure the Impact of Coaching

Inspired by the Kirkpatrick framework, CoffeeChat uses a series of touch points throughout the coaching journey to ensure participants and their company see tangible results. When we work with companies to manage coaching programs, we leverage our platform to collect data from participants in order to measure how successful the program is compared with the company’s intended goals. Here is the typical pathway of learning stages:

Level 1 - Reaction: How do participants respond to the coaching?

It’s always valuable to get rapid feedback on how an individual felt about a specific session. This can help identify if there is ongoing satisfaction with the coaching process and to keep the engagement on track. By asking how the session went, we are essentially capturing what is called a Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) across many industries and service types. With coaching, this is just the beginning of the measurement process and doesn’t yet capture the true intended outcomes.

Level 2 - Learning: How much do they learn from coaching?

Following multiple sessions, we ask participants to self-identify specific areas of growth they are focusing on during coaching sessions and to what extent they believe there has been progress. These responses help measure the how much is being taken from the sessions and applied in real-life scenarios. Because self-awareness is an important component of coaching, this information is a good short-term indicator of coaching success. It still remains limited to one perspective thus additional information is required in the following levels.

Level 3 - Behavior: How much do they apply?

Following at least 5-6 sessions over 3-6 months, we ask participants to fill a deeper self-assessment about their overall transformation from coaching. We often coordinate with their team to conduct a 360 feedback process to understand the growth being observed and appreciated by those working with the participant. These data points provide a much more robust measurement of the direct impact of coaching on areas such as leadership style, productivity, communication.

Level 4 - Results: What are the benefits?

To make the business case of investing in coaching for staff, it’s also crucial to link coaching outcomes with business metrics. One could argue that it’s difficult to know the outcome of a situation where a manager was not provided coaching, such as a team underperforming due to unresolved team dynamics or poor communication. However, its more powerful to empower Human Resource teams to quantify measurable outcomes such as improvement in staff retention rates, reported team-wide levels of productivity, or other priority goals such as promotion rates. CoffeeChat works with each of its clients to identify their own set of priority business metrics in order to include them in our impact measurement tools for their program.