While for the most part, employees with even a reasonable sense of ethics, or even just personal ambition, are already doing a great job for their employers, there are always exceptions. Those exceptions can have serious negative impact on the bottom line, so it's important to try and shore up the laggards as best as possible. That's where coaching skills come into play for management, and those same coaching skills can often provide a greatly improved level of employee satisfaction and productivity.

Yes, record unemployment makes it easier than ever to replace said employees, but that takes time, and lost production trying to bring someone new up to speed. Thus, it's generally a better idea to look at ways to improve the work force on hand before trying to make replacements, and the best place to start finding improvements in employees is to look at their managers. Recent studies suggest that one in every three employees doesn't believe that their current boss is an effective leader, and that's a problem; more specifically, that's a problem that coaching skills can fix.  

Effective leaders mean gains in productivity, as effective leaders know how to praise employees for doing their jobs properly, which in turn makes the employee feel more personally invested in the success of the company. Employees with that particular level of "skin in the game" in turn provide better work--they actively believe they're making a difference--and that's important to the overall success of the company as a whole. Coaching skills training helps provide the skills necessary to not only praise for good work, but also help correct behaviors that aren't so useful.

Better, coaching skills can keep turnover down. While a bad economy will also help on that front, the engagement that coaching skills provide not only works to help employees provide their best effort, it also keeps them wanting to stay where they can provide that best effort. Few things feel worse for many employees than the thought that they're just launching their work into the ether, hoping that it makes a difference somewhere. No one likes screaming at an empty room, and nature has always abhorred a vacuum. Coaching skills let employees feel they're actually making a difference, and employees like to be where they're making a difference.

With employees interested and wanting to stay interested, it follows that the same coaching skills that provided those two points would also provide a third: improving overall performance. Employees making a difference will want to make a difference where they can. Management that's all on the same page can show employees just how to make that difference. That means better performance all around.

Coaching skills are a small, and thus often overlooked, part of the overall employee management experience. But taking the time, and the slight investment, to augment management's coaching skills will likely pay dividends in terms of better productivity, better employee engagement, reduced turnover, and even potential improvements to the bottom line. It's hard to turn away from any tool that has that kind of capability in the right hands, and that's why coaching skills are a great buy for any company.