How to Empower Managers to be Great Coaches and Improve Team Performance
Your company’s success begins and ends with your managers.
Managers shape the entirety of the employee experience, and their approach to recognition, feedback, goal setting, and performance management will make or break your employees’ time and impact at your company.
There’s one small catch: managers are burnt out and fed up. Pick any manager and flip a coin—there’s a 50 percent chance they report feeling burnt out at work.
It’s an alarming statistic, but not an unsurprising one. The working world faces disruption from every angle. Artificial intelligence, economic uncertainty, generational change, and the rise of remote work have placed new and compounding pressures on the managerial set.
For many managers, the dam’s about to burst.
Better supporting your managers isn’t just a nice idea. It’s the right idea for companies looking to maximize their team’s full potential and reach business success. By investing in modern tech tools, companies can empower their managers to lead and succeed, ensuring they have everything they need to guide their team’s performance——and better lead them through whatever change comes next.
How to empower managers with Bonusly
Our mission at Bonusly is to make work better, and we believe that mission centers on a strategic, intentional approach to employee recognition. We help companies celebrate their employees as people, recognize outstanding work and winning behaviors, and develop high-performing teams through positive and constructive feedback.
To champion a winning team, managers need real and reliable tools in each of these endeavors. That’s where we come in.
1:1s and goals
Bonusly offers a host of modern tech tools to help managers build more effective relationships with their reports, including 1:1s templates and agenda suggestions that allow teams to set and track progress toward professional goals.
Picture this: You’ve got a tenured manager who consistently delivers results. As a top performer, she tends to inherit your biggest, hairiest goals. In the past two quarters, though, you’ve noticed that she seems stretched thin, and in skip level meetings, her reports say they don’t fully understand their quarterly goals. One team member gives feedback that his one-on-ones have become a harried list of status updates, and nothing more.
The solution? Effective one-on-one meetings and clear goal setting are cornerstones of successful management. But many managers lack the right tools to streamline these touchpoints. And one-on-ones are often the first management moments that fail when work picks up.
Bonusly takes the admin burden off of your managers’ plates by giving them and their team structured 1:1 templates and check-in reminders, making it easier for managers to prepare and engage more meaningfully with their direct reports. Templates are set up to help managers guide continuous growth conversations and deepen relationships, week in and week out.
Managers can also set and track goals inside the Bonusly 1:1 template, which creates a space for timely updates and better visibility, while ensuring everyone stays aligned and accountable. With the right technology, managers can foster more productive discussions and create a clear path toward achieving objectives.
Performance recaps
Performance recaps allow managers to quickly summarize past recognition and feedback trends in an automated report of contributions, skills, goals, and growth opportunities—saving your team hours of time in the process.
Picture this: Your sales manager has 13 direct reports, and your six-month performance review cycle overlaps with the end of a make-or-break quarter. Instead of spending time helping his team close deals, he is off the floor staring at a blank screen, trying to write a performance review based on historical job performance he can barely remember. He has the sales numbers, sure—but is drawing a blank on skill development and specific contributions.
It’s no wonder that 98% of CHROs think traditional performance management is broken.
The solution? Traditional performance reviews are outdated and ineffective, and leave managers and employees frustrated. Bonusly’s automated performance recaps transform this process by translating historical recognition and feedback trends into insights that kickstart growth conversations—and provide the empirical evidence needed to add context and color to your review cycles.
By utilizing software that captures recognition and feedback in the flow of work, tracks progress against goals, and enables employee self-reflections, managers can access a more holistic, dynamic, and constructive performance review tool. The fact that these automated recaps are available at the push of a button is icing on the cake.
With Bonusly, you can alleviate the pressure of annual reviews—and foster a culture of ongoing dialogue and development in the process.
Recognition and feedback
Bonusly allows teams to regularly share positive recognition and solicit constructive feedback on projects as the work unfolds. Frequent, timely, and meaningful feedback between peers and teams build a culture of ongoing collaboration and development.
Picture this: You have a dedicated and hard-working employee on your customer success team who consistently goes above and beyond to deliver value to your customers. She independently works with your product and finance teams to resolve issues before they negatively affect the customer experience. She’s intrinsically motivated and creates real impact on your business. In short: she’s best-in-class talent.
But her work is well below the surface of her manager’s purview. He has visibility into her success metrics, but because she independently coordinates with other departments to resolve issues before they’re formally assigned, her manager is woefully unaware of her full impact. Come review time, she creates a business case for a promotion. The manager only sees the tip of the iceberg and denies the request. Frustrated, demotivated, and hungry for growth, you can guess what she does next.
The solution? Meaningful recognition and feedback are vital for employee morale and performance. They provide valuable signals to your managers about where to focus their efforts to effect greater change. But ask any manager and you’ll hear they struggle to find the time or tools to provide consistent, meaningful recognition and feedback.
Bonusly facilitates peer-to-peer recognition so all team members can celebrate great work from their collaborators. We also enable employees to solicit real-time feedback. Integrating public recognition and thoughtful feedback directly into daily workflows helps your managers better appreciate their teams’ contributions and capture valuable performance insights, helping them celebrate and coach as the work unfolds.
Clear and consistent feedback, be it positive or constructive, ultimately boosts employee engagement and drives better results. Bonusly enables managers to build and track these feedback loops to unlock their team’s full potential.
Celebrations, rewards, and awards
Bonusly helps automate the celebration of important employee milestones like anniversaries and birthdays, and provides other ways for managers to celebrate and incentivize their team. With Bonusly, managers can tie digital rewards into customizable milestones, goals, and incentives, helping to motivate employees and build a stronger connection to your company.
Picture this: You are an HR manager of one in a 75-person organization. You do your best to create a culture where employees feel valued and appreciated as people first—but 75 birthdays and anniversaries are a lot to keep track of manually. You know that the manager of your data team is concerned one of their top performers is a flight risk, as they’ve become increasingly disengaged and disillusioned. This week, you missed that employee’s three-year anniversary, and you’re nervous this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The solution? Celebrating key milestones and rewarding hard work is essential for team morale, yet many managers can’t efficiently and effectively do so. Technology can play a pivotal role by automating employee milestone celebrations and gamifying rewards.
Managers can leverage Bonusly to create fun awards, build incentives or celebrate important milestones but take the headache out of rewards management—simplifying employee rewards and ensuring no one falls through the cracks.
By automating these aspects of your company’s culture, managers can focus their time and energy on relationships and skill development instead of worrying if they forgot someone’s birthday.
Manager analytics
Our data-driven analytics provide rich insights into recognition trends among employees, helping managers keep a pulse on contributions at the individual and team level.
Picture this: You’re a director of two different departments that have 20 employees each. With that many reports, it’s impossible to keep track of each employee’s individual to-do list. You hear anecdotally from another director that one of your employees on the support team consistently receives positive feedback from that director’s team—at a much higher level than you’d expect.
You chalk this up to your employee going above and beyond and identify her as a top performer.
The only problem? She’s getting more recognition because the workload is unbalanced, and a workflow issue has resulted in her getting three times as many tickets as her peers.
The solution? Keeping an eye on recognition trends helps managers paint a more vibrant picture of the work being done. As it stands, managers have limited visibility into workloads and impact—and often end up flying blind.
Analytics dashboards like ours help managers better understand how the work is being done and who is collaborating with whom. These team insights can surface important information around team performance, individual contributors, and opportunities to improve workflows.
The takeaway
Empowering managers to lead their teams is essential in building an engaged and high-performing workforce. By equipping managers with the right tech tools that support them in these efforts, companies can unlock new levels of performance and create an environment where managers and employees thrive.
With the right tools in their toolbox, managers can significantly uplevel their approach to performance management—and better lead your company through whatever comes next.
Schedule your demo with Bonusly today to learn more about how we can help empower your managers to unlock their team’s full potential.
