When a company compares coaches, the coaching itself is very hard to judge in a pitch meeting, so the decision is often made on the things around it: can we see whether this is working, can we promise our people that their sessions stay confidential, and how much of our own time is this going to cost us. If you bring Coach Automator into your offer you can answer all three with something concrete rather than a promise, and in our experience that is often what decides who gets the contract and who gets the renewal.
Each sponsor gets their own login and a report at the end of every quarter showing who took part, how many sessions were used, how many goals are on track and which themes came up. The person who approved the budget has something to show their own boss, which is generally what makes the renewal conversation easy.
A sponsor cannot see what was said in a session, what was written in a journal or what was discussed in chat, and there is no setting that would let them. Every coachee can see for themselves exactly what the company receives. HR can put that in the invitation email, and in our experience it makes a real difference to how many people actually engage with the coaching.
Every participant gets their own private app with the worksheets, videos, habits, goals and check-ins of your program arriving on schedule for the whole engagement, plus breakout teams and a private chat with you. To the company this looks like a designed program with a start, a structure and a finish, and that is a very different proposition from a coach who offers a block of sessions.
The company’s own effort is small: one contract, one invoice with their purchase-order number, and a renewal next year that simply carries the same team on with its history intact.
At the end of each period (usually a quarter, but you decide) every sponsor is emailed the engagement report. It shows who was coached, how many sessions were used out of how many were bought, what the period cost, and which breakout teams exist and what they are working on. The report is generated by the system on the day the period ends, so it is never late and it is never sent twice.
There are four switches that decide what goes into the report: participation, utilization, goal progress (as a count of goals on track, not the goals themselves) and anonymized themes. You can turn any of them off.
Your coachees can see the same report. Their portal has a tab called What your sponsor sees, and it shows them the very same document the sponsor received (and not a summary of it). In our experience this is what makes people relax and actually use the coaching, because they know for certain what is and is not being passed on.
You can split the group into breakout teams, e.g. for peer coaching or accountability between the group sessions, each with a name and a short description of what the team is for. Any exercise you assign to a breakout team shows up in each member’s own app, and a meeting booked for one team invites only the people in that team.
Every breakout team has its own private chat which only its current members and you can read. You can also aim a program step at “each breakout team”, and whichever teams exist on that day will get the exercise, so you do not have to redo the program when the teams change.
The quarterly report tells the company which breakout teams exist, who is on them and what each team was asked to do. It does not tell them whether it was done, who did what, or anything the team discussed. So the company can see that the group is working together, and the participants can talk freely inside their team.
This was a nine-month program for a regional hospital network, aimed at the next generation of clinical leaders. It had nine live modules, project teams working on a real patient-flow problem in the hospital, and presentations to hospital leadership at the midpoint and again at the end.
Around each module there was a set of touchpoints, i.e. some preparation before the live session, application and practice exercises afterwards, and a reflection that led into the next module. Every participant got the same sequence at the same time, for nine months.
If you add it up, that is roughly 100 deliverables for one cohort, and sending those by hand for nine months is essentially a part-time job (and usually the part that slips first when the coach gets busy). On the platform each piece went out on its day and each sponsor report went out at the end of each period, so the coach could spend the time on the actual coaching. Keep in mind that this consistency is generally what the company remembers when it comes to renewing.
This is one example and not a template you have to use. You design your own program, and the platform runs it the same way.
