Skills Coach

Information about the Skills Coach feature, how to access and what is included

Jared Ellis avatar
Written by Jared Ellis
Updated over a week ago

What can I learn from this page?

Information about the Skills Coach feature, how to access and what is included

Who is this guide for?

All Users

Skills Coach is available for all Culture Amp customers.

💡 Tip: Check out our course to learn more about the content, our tips for rolling it out, and a checklist for success!

What is Skills Coach?

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

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

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

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Get started

Once Skills Coach has been turned on for your organization, all users have access to Skills Coach from the main navigation.

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  1. Go to Development > Skills Coach

  2. Select start on the course you would like to launch

  3. Congrats! The course is now launched. From here you'll jump straight into the first activity. If you decide not to start right away, you'll receive an email notification prompting you to complete the first activity on the next business day.

  4. After finishing your first day you can optionally customise your notification settings to use Slack or Teams, and update your prompt time and timezone.

Note: Once a skill is launched, you will receive a daily notification 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:

What’s included

  • Skills Coach is available to any Culture Amp customers.

  • Skills Coach courses including Coaching, Feedback, Resilience, Productivity, Strategic thinking, 1-on-1s, Meetings mastery and People development. Learn more about the content in our CAT course.

  • Skills Coach daily activities and reminders are delivered through Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email.

  • To use Skills Coach through Slack, your organization must have an active Slack integration.

  • To use Skills Coach through Microsoft Teams, your organization must have an active Teams integration.

If you have any further questions contact our Support team.

Admin-only mode

Account admins have the ability to preview Skills Coach before turning it on for your organization. When logged in as an account admin, go to Development > Skills Coach. You'll see the option to turn on Skills Coach and make it available for all users in your company. To turn on admin-only mode, navigate to Admin > Learning.

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Invitations

Account Admins can use the invitations feature to invite employees to a course via email.

To access invitations, log in as an Account Admin and go to Development > Skills Coach. Once you're on the Skills Coach home page click on the Invitations button in the secondary navigation.

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The Invitations page will display your draft and sent invitations, as well as the option to create a new invitation.

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Creating an invitation will take you to a simple workflow interface where you select a course, write an optional custom message, select a list of recipients, and send.

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Note:

  • On the participants page, you can checkbox the users you would like to invite to the course one by one however there is no bulk select option

  • Skills coach Invitations can only be sent via email.

  • Skills coach course reminders can be sent via slack (only if the overall account has Slack enabled), teams OR email depending on the preference set by the user.

Reporting

Admins can now view the usage stats for Skills Coach invitations.

How does it work?


Admins can view invitation statistics by clicking on sent invitations. Viewing a sent invitation will show the progress of the invited participants at 3 levels of detail:

  • A summary showing the number of participants invited, active, and completed

  • The status of a participant (paused, completed, or current activity)

  • A CSV report download for that invitation

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Additionally, admins can also click to the Reporting button and be presented with a high-level overview of their organisation's usage.

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Admins can click to Export individual usage to download this data in .csv format

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FAQs

Can I do more than one course at a time?

No. We believe it is important to focus on one skill at a time. New habits are created one at a time.

Can I do more than one activity per day?

No, because we know that reading content is not enough to change behavior. We need to actually put things into practice.

New activities are unlocked after you've had some time to absorb and practice the current day's lesson. We’ll send you a message when the next activity is unlocked and ready to go.

Can I restrict access to specific groups?

Yes. You can restrict to admins only from your account admin settings. This allows admins to test Skills Coach before making it available to all employees.

However, you can not restrict access to more granular groups. Keeping Skills Coach accessible to all employees is important. We believe the skills we are teaching can not be improved in a vacuum and require interaction with other people. Accordingly, we want people to include others in their learning - requesting feedback and sharing courses. Building out features like this is far easier when all users within an account have access to Skills Coach.

Are the courses I see the same for everyone?

Yes! If you have access to Skills Coach, you can see all of the available courses.

Are there different courses for different levels of employees?

The course curriculum we’re currently building is based on LifeLabs Learnings CORE program which includes a mix of manager- and individual-focused courses. Currently most of the courses available in skills coach are manager-focused, though they still provide a lot of value for individual contributors and aspiring leaders. We’ll continue to build out more of the individual-focused courses over the coming year.

Can I customize the content?

No. We have worked with experienced behavior scientists and content writers to create a complete behavior change experience, so our content is finely tuned to achieve these outcomes.

How can I review the content?

Account administrators will be able to access course outlines and previews from the Skills Coach homepage. From there, you can drill down into specific courses and activities using a simple and intuitive interface. When reviewing an activity, you can interact with the content in exactly the same way managers do to get a feel for the Skills Coach experience.

What notifications are sent?

Skills Coach users receive a morning daily prompt for each new day of content after completing the last. A completed day of content is also followed up by an afternoon nudge to check in on their practice for the day.

If they don’t complete the day’s activity, they receive up to 3 daily reminders, after which the reminder frequency drops to weekly.

  • If an activity is completed before 3pm, users will be able to do the next activity the very next day.

  • If an activity is completed after 3pm, users will have to wait until the following day for the next activity.

How can I stop the notifications?

Pause the course from the specific course page.

Can users change the time or frequency of notifications?

The timing of notifications can be changed from your Skills Coach preferences. The frequency of the notifications can not be changed.

Is Skills Coach available to performance and engagement customers?

Yes. It is available with any Culture Amp subscription.

How can I roll this out to my company?

Account administrators can use the Skills Coach Invitations feature to easily invite their employees to start a course. You simply choose a course, customize an optional message, select a list of recipients and hit send.

What does an invitation look like for the recipient?

Your customized invitation message will appear in the purple block as shown below:

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The message is not attributed. Remember to put your name in the message if you want the recipients to know who it's from.

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