Face-to-face meetings with your direct reports are often held in a hurry and with loose organization. It is vital to handle one-on-ones with your employees recurrently, but how best to use the time? How to make one-on-ones more productive and engaging? Why are one-on-one meetings so important?

Why are one-on-one meetings so important?

The 1-on-1 meetings are vital for team relationships, whether you work for a startup or a huge company. It is the only way to find what is happening in the team and what the employee is feeling and thinking. These meetings do not tailor to discuss the results of current tasks; you can get them as a list at any time in Slack or the task manager you use. The one-on-one discussions affect not only personal relationships but also the performance of the entire company. This article discusses how to conduct 1-on-1 meetings in a way that allows managers to get the most out of them.

3 core benefits of one-on-ones for employees

Career development

One-on-one meetings help ensure employees get everything they need to develop and grow in their professional roles. The manager may act as a partner and coach, driving employees’ professional development. During the meetings, the employee gets the feedback and guidance they need to succeed in their role and advance in their career.

Confidence-building

One of the core goals of one-on-one meetings is to build trust between the manager and the team member and strengthen the working relationship. That goal is the foundation for everything else. It will be much easier to handle projects, tasks, and initiatives together if the relationship is built on trust.

Problem-solving

While it’s important not to turn one-on-one meetings into status meetings, they can still be efficient for resolving current issues. You can take the time to figure out some ambiguous working moments together and work on finding solutions. The main thing is not to make this the main focus of the meeting.

3 core benefits of one-on-ones for managers

Staying informed

A one-on-one meeting is a powerful instrument, and its effect is similar to an ultrasound investigation. One-on-one meetings are not only a fundamental tool in building relationships between a manager and employees, but also probably the best source of knowledge about the organization for a manager.

From my experience, managers who don’t hold one-on-one meetings know very little about what’s going on in their organizations.

Maintaining a high level of motivation

According to the Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace survey, 85% of the world’s employees work without proper involvement in their work. In other words, only 15% of employees feel motivated to perform their work tasks productively. Another study conducted by the international recruitment company Hays confirms this alarming trend and suggests that 81% of employees are ready to quit as soon as they receive a quality offer. One-on-one meetings provide an opportunity to work through this point.

A good practice for assessing employee engagement is a questionnaire. Managers can use a specific set of questions during one-on-one meetings to make sure the team members feel motivated and can realize their talents at work. More good advice on how to keep employees engaged can be found in Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s book: First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, which is based on numerous surveys of thousands of managers and hundreds of thousands of employees.

Documenting successes

There is a good practice of documenting all the successes and achievements of a team member. Participants can take up to 10 minutes in a one-on-one meeting to record these moments. Sometimes, after creating such a list, participants may be surprised at how much they have done. Also, discussing this list allows the manager to express gratitude to a team member.

Tip1 : Take the time and stick to a schedule

The periodicity of one-on-one meetings usually depends on the size of your team, the company size, and the demand and experience of your employees. Don’t have these meetings spontaneously. The power of one-on-ones lies in consistency and structure. Try to experiment with frequency before you find the optimal rhythm. But keep in mind that generally, one-on-one meetings are time-consuming.

A meeting with one employee can take 15 to 30 minutes. On average, parties may spend on preparation and summing up another 20 to 30 minutes. Additionally, participants need to allocate the time to accomplish the tasks discussed at such meetings. To sum up, the manager may spend about 1.5 to 2 hours per one employee. If one has 2 teams of 5 employees each and 1-on-1 meetings scheduled every two weeks, then it turns out that it takes up to 40 hours a month. That is a lot, and frequently, such meetings are considered as background activities complementing the primary job focus.

Tip 2: Prepare the talking points

You need to collaborate on and prepare a one-on-one agenda with your colleague ahead of time. Ideally, parties iteratively add talking points into the 1-on-1 agenda as they occur.

Take some time before the meeting to prepare:

• Review the status of current objectives and achievements.
• Check the notes from the last meeting and decide if there are important points to return to in the upcoming meeting.
• Prioritize the talking points to focus on the most important first.
• Determine what would you like to know? There is a list of questions from your direct report, but what do you personally want to know?

If no questions come to mind during the preparation, consider the following:

Problems and concerns.

Are there things you do not know but should have?

Example questions on current tasks and load:
— What tasks motivate you the most?
— When have you been bored lately?
— What’s stopping you from doing the best you can do right now?
— What annoys you and how can it be fixed?
— What don’t you like about our product or service?

Feedback on the work you have done.

What can be improved? How does your employee see things from the outside perspective?

Example questions on performance feedback:
— Do you need more or less feedback on your work?
— What work aspect requires my help and support the most?
— What is the last situation you would like to deal with differently? What would you change?

Personal contact.

What happens to an employee outside the office? How does he spend the weekend? Ask about the hobby or what would they like to do?

Example of personal type of questions:
— How did you spend last weekend?
— How is your family?
— Where have you vacationed lately, what have you liked?

Career.

How can you support an employee in achieving their career goals? What role does the company play in the strategic objectives for the employee?

Example of career-related questions:
— In what directions would you like to develop?
— What would you like to learn?
— Is there an area outside of your current role where you feel you can fulfill yourself?
— If you could play your ideal role in the company, what would it look like?

Tip 3: Meet in an informal setting

You may conduct one-on-ones in several ways — however, there is no doubt that the personal meeting is the most valuable. If you are in the office, try to find the quietest room possible, which should not be necessarily equipped for work. The better case would be to leave the office and go for a walk or sit in a quiet cafe. The non-formal environment will let you rest from the office routines and focus on the dialogue.

Due to pandemic reasons, one-on-ones may be conducted online. In this case, you can also leave your daily location and go outside. However, in this case, make sure your internet connection is solid and stable, and video devices can translate a high-quality image.

No matter where you meet, choose a place where you and your colleague feel comfortable speaking openly.

Tip 4: Define action items

Agreements will not turn into reality on their own once your meeting ends. The success is often proportional to the effort made, so 1-on-1 discussions between employees must be followed by actions - in this case, participants will succeed in moving towards existing objectives.

The result of a one-on-one meeting, in the ideal case, should be a list of action items — a detailed plan of who and what is going to do or achieve? Basically the action items define what need to be accomplished between this meeting and the next, and assign them to an owner to denote responsibility.

Do not worry if such a list doesn’t appear once your one-on-one is over. It means that you just exchanged some information, which also might be the case. But when the result is the declared agreements and obligations of the parties, then the benefits are much higher.

Tip 5: Track the results

It is vital to speak about the results as soon as you achieve one. If you do not talk about successes, perhaps you are doing something wrong. It is essential not only to get the result but also to be able to evaluate it retrospectively and decide what you will do better next time and what will be as good as this time.

The manager’s job is to let people grow and enable team members to get things done. There’s no better feeling than knowing that you’re helping people become more productive and giving them the opportunity to be proud of what they do.

If your team consists of 5-7 people, it’s easy to hold one-on-one meetings. When several teams of 30 people interact with you, the appropriate tactic would be to choose 7-9 people who will play the leading role and hold one-on-one meetings with their teams.

To sum up

A 1-on-1 meeting is a constant feedback strategy that allows the manager and employee to keep track of events. It provides the employee the opportunity to develop skills and discuss problems in the workplace with the manager. Such meetings are more informal than annual performance reviews, as they focus on solving everyday problems and help the employee develop their strategies in the long term.

Without 1-on-1 meetings, everyone remains in their bubble. It might be comfortable, but life passes by, and your potential remains unrealized.

In all the teams I work with, we meet one-on-one regularly. We talk about obstacles and desired improvements, we promise to do something, and we do that, eventually getting the desired result. And when it works, we understand that it’s so incredibly cool to work in such teams! We can see that one-on-one works.