Skills Coach Early Access Program is available now for all Culture Amp customers who use Slack.

 

• What is Skills Coach?
• Get started 
• What to expect
• Tips for rolling out Skills Coach 
• What’s included in the EAP release 

What is Skills Coach?

Skills Coach is a new skill-based learning tool for managers that delivers engaging micro-content directly through Slack. 

The two minute daily activities transform managers by teaching them key leadership skills. Currently, Skills Coach includes 20 short interactive lessons backed by science that drive results and are easy for managers to use. 

Skills Coach is currently in EAP release, or Early Access Program. Customers with an active Slack integration are eligible for the Skills Coach early access release.  If your organization uses Slack, contact our Support team to enable Skills Coach for your Culture Amp account. 

Those who completed our initial pilot of the Skills Coach program reported:

• 94% improved coaching skills
• 82% improved team vibe, meetings or other outcomes
• 64% of peers noticed an improvement

Get started 

All Culture Amp users have access to Skills Coach from the main navigation. 

1. Go to Manager Learning > Skills Coach 
2. Select start on the skill you would like to launch - i.e., coaching or feedback
3. Follow the launch prompts to confirm your timezone and select the time you would like to receive daily notifications
4. Congrats! The skill is now launched. From here, start the first activity by clicking Start day 1. If you don’t start right away, you will receive a notification in Slack prompting you to complete the first activity on the next business day.

NOTE: Once a skill is launched, you will receive a daily Slack nudge from Culture Amp to complete the next two-minute activity. 

Why our People Scientists love it

Skills Coach uses three important components to make it as effective as possible:

• Spaced repetition: Just ask Ebbinghaus, humans forget things quickly. How quickly we forget is a constraint on our ability to learn. By repeating the same concepts, managers are more likely to remember them.
• Experiential learning: Skills Coach ends each lesson with a prompt to try something out with their direct reports. The next day it incorporates reflection questions to help managers experience, reflect, conceptualize, and then experiment some more following Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle.
• Reminders: Managers are reminded if they miss a lesson, and sent an afternoon nudge for important exercises. Reminders, while perhaps a bit boring, really do work to help people to change behavior and achieve their goals.  

What to expect with Skills Coach

We developed the Skills Coach content for Coaching in partnership with LifeLabs Learning, in the form of 20 micro-lessons. With these quick two-minute interactive lessons, learners will move from “solution mode” to “coaching mode,” taking on valuable skills like how to: 

• Ask questions for insight
• Ask questions for impact
• Listen actively and openly
• Reflect, summarize, and clarify 

Along the way, learners take part in skill-based exercises like asking more questions in their 1-on-1s, and new coaching concepts like: 

• The framing effect
• Introducing “air” into their conversations
• Using a beginner’s mindset
• The difference between the rate of words we can speak per minute versus process
• What LifeLabs learning calls playbacks and split-tracks

Tips for rolling out Skills Coach 

Introduce Skills Coach to your organization using this communication template. 

A few options for rolling out Skills Coach:

• Pilot it yourself or with your team for a slower rollout approach 
• Pilot with a cross-section of managers across departments and skill levels to learn who it most benefits. This practice has worked well for many customers in the initial release. 
• Give access to your entire organization. Coaching is useful whether you’re a manager or not! For that reason, we at Culture Amp gave all employees access.

What’s included in the early access release

• Skills Coach EAP is available to any Culture Amp customers that use Slack. Your organization must have an active Slack integration to use Skills Coach.  
• Skills Coach daily activities and reminders are delivered through Slack for the EAP release
• Slack and email delivery will be available with the full launch 
• Skills Coach EAP includes Coaching with 20 interactive micro-lessons, with additional content pathways on feedback and productivity that will launch later this year. 

If you have any further questions or would like to withdraw your account from the early access program, contact our Support team.