When you start a new role, you’ll inevitably spend some time learning the ropes before you really get stuck in. Once that’s done, however, make sure you don’t abandon that learning-based mindset. You need to keep learning if you expect to grow. That’s why you should embrace continuous coaching to build the key workplace habits that enable Human Success.
Research shows that most businesses worldwide fail to evaluate employees more than once a year. With that in mind, let’s look at the importance of effective habit-building, and why peer or manager coaching is often more impactful than rigid training frameworks and annual reviews.
Why annual performance cycles fail
Ask anyone about annual performance cycles and they’ll likely respond with criticism. And yet, according to Gartner, 76% of businesses globally only rated their people once a year in 2024. More recently, 74% have made the switch to ongoing feedback, but what causes annual reviews to fail, and why do so many employers continue to stick with them?
From a corporate perspective, it’s easy to understand the temptation of annual performance cycles. On the surface, annual reviews seem to be cost-effective as a single set of expenses. At the same time, restricting reviews to once a year minimizes disruption the rest of the time.
But these supposed benefits aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. In fact, annual reviews arguably cause more problems than they fix:
- Less impactful feedback: Feedback is most effective when it’s timely. If you wait too long, the recipient won’t clearly remember the inciting incident. This will make feedback harder to apply and easier to disregard.
- Annual review distress: Review season is stressful for everyone, manager or employee, whether it’s the stress of negative feedback or the ambiguity of not knowing what’s to come. Continuous coaching and feedback, on the other hand, set clear expectations ahead of review season so everyone knows what’s around the corner.
- Hidden costs and disruption: Besides the direct financial cost of running performance reviews, they can cost your business in other ways. First, the disruption of running all reviews at once can disrupt workflows and damage quarterly earnings. Second, the lack of regular feedback means ongoing performance issues go unaddressed for months at a time, affecting your bottom line.
What does this mean for performance reviews?
We aren’t necessarily suggesting you scrap performance reviews. They can still be a useful data source and a capstone for personal development. Rather, to make sure they have value, it’s important to build strong workplace habits like ongoing feedback and continuous coaching throughout the year.
What “continuous coaching” means (and what it doesn’t)
At Zensai, we often frame employee development in terms of formal training, like the elearning options available through Learn365. But training courses aren’t tool on your belt for developing employees. Coaching methods like the GROW model are another that’s often more personal due to the dynamic between mentor and mentee.
Before you and your team start building habits, it’s important to choose the right ones. So, what is continuous coaching, and what separates it from more problematic approaches?
Continuous coaching is:
- Regular feedback: Coaching is often the best way to give timely advice. Unlike more rigid frameworks, coaching can be informal and ad-hoc as well as structured. Regular coaching builds up a dialogue built on trust, encouraging employees to be more honest about their experiences.
- Advice based on experience: Your coach may well be your line manager or a more experienced peer. Someone who can relate to your experience. Someone who’s been around the business long enough to navigate it effectively and develop effective, regular habits. Good coaches and mentors not only improve employee prospects, but their own by extension.
- A form of moral support: Coaches and mentors do more than dispense tips on working well. As someone who can relate to your experience, a good coach is someone who can provide reassurance, help you navigate work culture, and address difficult issues like discrimination or other unfair treatment.
Continuous coaching is NOT:
- Micromanagement: Remember that “continuous” does not mean “constant.” Coaching and mentorship are about supporting someone consistently, not breathing down the back of their neck.
- A replacement for formal feedback: While coaching can certainly be embedded in formal processes like employee check-ins and 1:1 review meetings, its potential for informality is one of its biggest strengths. Even so, it works best when used to supplement more formal reviews with ongoing feedback.
Why workplace habits matter more than frameworks
There are times when instilling workplace habits can be a more effective way of getting results than frameworks. Of course, that’s not to say frameworks are useless. In fact, they can be a great way of establishing policies and best practices. But good habits have their own advantages when it comes to guiding employees and affecting workplace culture.
Workplace habits operate in the flow of work
One of the biggest differences between frameworks and habits is that the former tends to be episodic. In other words, they’re only relevant at specific points in the month or year. You might use best practice frameworks for things like performance conversations, check-ins, or to conduct training.
As a result, frameworks tend to have little value beyond their immediate use cases. Habits, on the other hand, are continuous. You might set habits like:
- Checking in at the same time every week
- Handling certain responsibilities before/after lunch
- Taking time for self-reflection at the end of the day
- Checking for personal identifiers when handling employee data
We could quite literally list examples of workplace habits all day, but you get the idea. Habits are so personal and flexible that they fit naturally into the flow of work.
Automaticity versus complexity
The most difficult thing about regular habits is the act of forming them. But, once habits stick, they become… well, habitual. Reflex responses that you barely have to think about. That’s automaticity in a nutshell.
Frameworks, on the other hand, are rigid and complex. They might contain any number of rules or caveat for employees to refer back to. This often makes them too fiddly to form effective habits around. If you have to think about it, then it’s not automatic.
Workplace habits foster ownership and engagement
Another thing workplace habits have over formal frameworks is that they feel more personal. That may sound like a soft distinction, but it’s one that can make a world of difference. By comparison, frameworks are a corporately mandated requirement with which employees may feel they’re forced to comply.
Good habit-building is based on common sense and practical experience, which ties it more closely to a sense of expertise. Enabling employees to set effective habits over HR-mandated frameworks leaves more room for personal autonomy.
That means your people are more likely to feel a sense of ownership over their contributions, which is important to all employees, but especially Gen Z. This ultimately means they’ll care more. And, when employees care, they’re more likely to be engaged in their roles. So, while frameworks can often feel stifling, workplace habits can instead be empowering.
The science of habit formation
Building habits is a fundamentally neurological activity. The more you do something, the greater its reinforcement on the neural pathways of your brain. That’s why strongly instilled habits are so reflexive and independent of thought.
This is also why workplace habits can be effective without being a distraction. They keep your mental load minimal so you can focus on complex decision-making. But that’s not all.
Big habits stem from small actions that compound into a larger ripple effect. Those tiny, autonomous decisions that save increments of time have a combined impact worth whole hours of the day. And that’s a recipe to make your work less stressful as well as more efficient.
How coaching workplace habits affects the everyday
To reiterate, coaching is a vital tool because it can address essential aspects of employee growth that formal training may overlook. Let’s look at some of the ways it can affect the everyday employee experience.
Senior or peer mentorship
According to SHRM research, “more than half of workers (54%) feel strongly motivated to persevere through career adversity when they have a mentor or sponsor.”
Basically, having someone in your corner makes you more engaged and resilient. And that’s exactly what a coach is for. It’s not just about job related feedback. A good mentor helps you better understand your workplace culture and the industry it sits inside. They can teach you about expectations, unwritten rules, and where to look for opportunities.
For example, let’s say you’re mentoring a young lawyer at a law firm. As a more experienced colleague, you can relate to someone going through what you’ve experienced. You can share your own effective habits for working efficiently, how to manage their stress in a competitive environment, and the best ways to get noticed.
These everyday coaching interactions help mold the workplace habits of future leaders and specialists. So, in addition to benefitting the employees getting coached, being a mentor that supports succession planning can pay career dividends for the ones doing it.
Continuous coaching means regular reinforcement
As another form of regular feedback, continuous coaching has many of the same benefits as an employee check-in. They’re timely, consistent, and help to build a dialogue based on mutual trust and respect.
The potential frequency of coaching makes it a great tool for reinforcing effective workplace habits while curbing bad ones. When regular feedback references recent behavior, employees are more likely to clearly recall it. AI coaching can help with consistency if managers
Let’s look at a small, seemingly inconsequential habit like file-naming. Messy file-naming practices can clutter up folders and make it harder to find key resources manually. A coach might pull their mentee up on something like this, not because they’re strict, but because doing it right will genuinely save them time in the future.
Employees anticipate coaching conversations
While talking about effective workplace habits, let’s not forget that coaching conversations are one as well. The more we engage in them, the more comfortable they become. In the beginning, employees might struggle to open up to you for fear of backlash. As you have more of these discussions, however, it gradually builds a relationship of trust that encourages honesty.
When employees trust and rely on coaching conversations, they’ll start to anticipate them. When something happens (good or bad), they’ll be more likely to make note of it and bring it up with their mentor. Managers who focus on coaching can find they learn a lot more about how their people work and feel than they knew before.
Case in point, let’s say you have a disagreement with a coworker. Knowing you can talk about it with your mentor might keep you from having a hot-headed reaction. Instead, you stay calm, knowing you’ve got someone to talk to before you decide to confront anyone or raise an issue with HR.
How HR and leaders enable better workplace habits
If you’re a senior leader, a manager, or HR team member reading this, you might be wondering, “what can I do?”
Well, for one thing, don’t worry. Here are three simple tips for enabling better workplace habits for your team:
- Lead by example: “Do as I say, not as I do” is rarely an effective management style. Instead, try to model good workplace habits for your team. People who look to you as an authority figure will unconsciously mirror your behavior, and if you do mention habit-building, you’ll have personal proof to back it up.
- Have democratized habit-building discussions: It’s important to involve employees in discussions on company culture issues like workplace habits. What works for some may not work for others, and employees may have their own ideas for innovative habits you may not have considered.
- Enable autonomy: Trusting employees to set their own workflows may seem risky, but it enables them to take ownership of their work and establish the habits that work best for them. It also makes these habits feel like more of a choice than a mandated policy.
How continuous coaching supports Human Success
Let’s finish up by looking at some of the ways continuous coaching and mentorship support Human Success in your organization. Human Success is about looking at the full picture of learning, performance, and engagement to put your people first. So, how does continuous coaching enable that?
Coaching builds a growth culture at work
When coaching becomes commonplace in your organization, it subtly influences the mindsets of everyone involved. It reinforces that, no matter where we all are in our careers, we’re all still learning.
You’ll see this reflected in the levels of understanding people give one another (new hires especially). And, as the personal benefits for mentors and mentees become more apparent, you’ll likely see more people proactively learning or teaching those around them.
Workplace habits support professional skills
Professional skills training is extremely important. For one thing, every business has certain compliance requirements. For another, people need particular job skills to be able to work effectively and confidently.
But training courses aren’t necessarily the best for teaching us about our local work culture, or about a job’s ethical or emotional demands. Continuous coaching addresses this by connecting employees with more experienced mentors who understand.
In that sense, coaching isn’t just about improving performance, but rather giving your people the understanding they need to thrive in your organization.
Coaching makes the employee experience more engaging
eLearning and asynchronous check-ins are incredibly versatile tools for talent management but may sometimes feel a tad impersonal. Coaching, which often relies on in-person 1:1s, is inherently personal.
These conversations give employees an empathetic figure. A way to get things off their chest in a professional environment, as well as a source of practical advice. This means coaches are well-positioned to catch signs of disengagement early and take steps to address them.
After all, while many things affect engagement, being valued and cared about by others in the organization are among the most important.
Enable Human Success with effective workplace habits
Human Success is ultimately about empowering your people. So, it makes sense to take an approach that avoids disempowering them. While formal frameworks are essential in some situations, in others, they can feel like a mandate that strips away control.
Giving employees the ability to learn and develop means giving them room to make their mistakes, learn from them, and use what they’ve learned to instill well-informed workplace habits. It’s the best way you can invest in their future potential.
If you want to learn more about the benefits of continuous coaching for setting long-term workplace habits, check out our ebook, Embracing Continuous Performance Management.