Is it tips for your one-on-one meeting you’re looking for? You’ve come to the right place. But before we jump in, let’s set the scene. The one-on-one meeting is possibly the most lightweight management tool you can use in your fledging company. We wrote at length here about what a one on one meeting is, why you should have it and some general one on one tips. In this post, we’ll go through best practices in more detail.

What is a one-on-one meeting?

Classically, the one-on-one meeting is a consistently recurring, timeboxed meeting between a manager and a direct report. However, since one-on-ones are so useful. I’ve seen companies as small as just two co-founders having them and there the relationship is more horizontal rather than vertical. So don’t get too hung up on the hierarchy of people in a one-on-one meeting. It doesn’t change their purpose and general structure.

One-on-one meetings help the flow of information from top to down and from down to up. As a manager you can share or explain the vision of the company or a shift in the market. You can talk about how the organization is growing and what challenges it faces. As an employee, you can share your aspirations and frustrations, motivations and barriers. One-onones are designed to be a space where candid conversations can happen about mostly work but also life and everything else in-between.

Therefore the one-on-one meeting provides a constant informal pulse of your organization, something that is invaluable as a manager. Imagine if you wouldn’t keep your finger on this pulse, you’d only get to know about problems when they are too late. You’d have to communicate changes in vision, strategy or the organization in a formal, top-down manner, something that has been proven to yield worse results. But you already know this and convinced you should start having one-on-ones. Or you are already doing them and just interested in some one-on-one tips. Whichever it might be, let’s get started.

One-on-one meeting tips

1. Set up a recurring meeting for the same time each week

When you become a manager of people, your day immediately gets busier. Even if it doesn’t it’ll sure look like it to anyone else. This means that people will have a hard time scheduling ad hoc meetings with you and might not even try. Set your one-on-one meetings up in advance for the same time each week. A good practice as a manger is to block off an entire day for one-on-ones. This will also help you avoid some of the other pitfalls we’ll discuss below.

2. Dedicate at least 30 minutes

As your company scales like crazy you might be tempted to think that you could optimize the time you spend on management by cutting down on people’s one-on-one time and get it over with with 10-15 minutes each. You’ve got 10 people working for you, that’s more than 2 hours potentially saved each week. No, they don’t work for you, as a manager, you’re working for them. Any meaningful conversation takes longer than 15 minutes.

A good rule of thumb is to dedicate at least 30 minutes to your one-on-one s and leave a 15 minute buffer after for any other meetings or tasks you might have coming up. If everything is smooth sailing you can use the extra 15 minutes to reflect on the one-on-one you just had or get some quick tasks off your plate or to grab a coffee and walk around a bit to relax.

3. Don’t cut the meeting short

This should go without saying since we talked about setting up a recurring meeting and dedicating a fixed time for it and the benefits of these approaches. However, I’ve seen this happen all too often so I think it’s important to mention. Do not cut a one-on-one meeting short because of something short of an outright emergency.

When you cut a one-on-one short it signals to the other person that whatever was the reason is more important to you than them. Even worse, it might signal that you’re incompetent at your job since you can’t even plan to set aside a set amount of time for something this personal and important. If all lights are green and there’s nothing to worry about, your team member might initiate to end the one-on-one early. This is fine and it’s okay to go along with it. But you shouldn’t be the one to propose this.

4. Never skip a one-on-one meeting

It seems easy to bail on a one-on-one in the face of other burning issues. After all, you talk every week, right? What can just one week delay cause? While one-on-one meetings might seem less directly mission critical when you’re in the tranches fighting fires, getting on calls with angry customers, talking to disinterested investors and trying to still make time for that one task you still need to do, don’t skip one on ones.

Just think about it, every time you skip a one-on-one meeting you send a clear message to your team member, “You don’t matter”. At least not as much as that quarterly investor update that you knew was coming up but you didn’t do it because you hate it. Every time you skip a one on one you become less in the eyes of your team. Don’t do it.

5. Start with “How are you?”

This is the perfect opener for any one-on-one. “How are you?” is a simple question where the answer is often very complicated. And that is where the one-on-one begins, with the answer. Depending on the tone and content of the answer you’ll decide where to go from there. Everything okay and you’re just checking in on each other? Is there a lingering issue that need to be solved so that value creation can continue unhindered? Is there a showstopper disaster that needs your undivided attention? It all starts with “How are you?”

This is also why you need at least 30 minutes for your discussion. Both of you needs to leave the daily grind of the business behind for a bit and reflect. A good way to start is by acknowledging how we’re feeling and then examine what are the likely causes of those feelings. If one has an idea on how to mitigate or reinforce the causes it’s great to bring it up. However, remember that you shouldn’t try to jump on everything and try to offer a seemingly quick solution. Just listen first, acknowledge how the other person is feeling and go from there. A lot of times, just sharing hardships can help or make the person realize the course of action they should take.

6. It’s not a status update

“How are you?” is also a great way to avoid another pitfall of one-on-one meetings, them turning into a status update. Because what a one-on-one is not is a way to keep on top of the to dos of the other person, to report on progress or to ask for the status of tasks. Pay attention to this as it is easy to fall back into this pattern if there is not much to talk about or if the team member doesn’t feel comfortable to talk about something. It is your job as a manager to make them feel comfortable to share. And while it might be easier for both of you to just talk about the status of ongoing things, don’t be tempted by it.

7. Don’t issue work tasks

Just like you shouldn’t turn a one-on-one meeting into a status update, you should also not use them to issue tasks related to daily operations. It is okay if based on your conversation your direct report comes up with stuff to do on their own, but you shouldn’t be the one instructing them in this meeting.

As far as one-on-one tips go, this one has an exception and it is when the task relates to an issue you’re discussing. Let’s say the person complains that the dev team is always frustrated that not all edge cases are covered on user stories and it brews resentment towards them, the PO and they are unsure how to deal with this. While you might know a great way to solve this, instead of outright instructing the person to use your method, you should gently guide them towards coming up with the solution themselves. This could mean that an action item for the next one on one meeting is to do some research on this problem and come up with a proposal. Note that this is not about what to do, but rather how things are done.

8. Follow up on your action items

As a manager it is your job to make sure your team can maximize their potential and deliver the most amount of value to users and to the business. In most of the cases you as the manager will end up with a lot of action items after a one-on-one meeting. One of the most important one-on-one tips is that you should make sure you either have completed or have something credible to show on the next one-on-one relating to your action items.

9. Keep things confidential

As far as one-on-one meeting tips go, this one is probably the most important. For successful one-on-one meetings, trust is very important. A lot of these one-on-one tips centered around building and keeping that trust. But a surefire way to damage it, maybe even permanently is to not keep something that was shared in private confidential.

So before you think about sharing some feedback with another team member for example, do ask for permission from the person who shared it. And when it comes to personal matters, it’s probably best not to even ask and just keep them between you two. Nobody wants to hear on an All Hands meeting that the company is giving everybody Headspace subscriptions because they had a panic attack at work.

Takeaways from these one-on-one meeting tips

I think you can spot a pattern here, people expect managers to be responsible, organized, accountable, trustworthy but relatable. It is not easy to pull all of this off and still keep the boundary between manager and team members. This is where I hope these 9 one-on-one tips help.

Do you have some one-on-one tips of your own? Do share them in the comments below.

Get focused

We here at Focus think that one-on-ones are an essential part of your management toolbox along with OKRs, check-ins and recognition. Check out how Focus can help you become a better manager and your team to maximize their potential.

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Status meetings are a serious waste of time 

The majority of employees hate meetings. A Korn Felly survey reveals that 67% of workers say spending too much time in meetings distracts them from doing their job. On average, 15% of an organization’s time is spent in meetings.

At the same time, we see that management is changing. Frederic Laloux in his book “Reinventing organizations” describes that powered authority based paradigm evolutes to relationships and people paradigm where the more teams are lead by values and purposes, not hierarchy formal roles. Self-management companies are the next stage in management evolution. 

Companies move away from costly status meetings that people don’t like to more lightweight solutions, especially in remote companies where a team should have a high level of self-management. Building a high-performing culture is a hard deal where managers should understand how to create strong communication and processes across the company.

Focus bot for standups and employee recognition in Slack

We launched a Focus bot that brings your communication in Slack to the next level. 

After talking with many teams, we had a clear view of status meetings and communication in companies. For project managers, it’s crucial to understand what’s going on in the team each day without long meetings or Zoom calls. For scrum master, it’s vital to run daily standups and build a culture of a self-organizing team. For teams, it’s better to go away from endless meetings and to be aligned across an organization to produce the highest outcomes. 

We believe that lightweight scrum meetings (aka daily standups) are a more effective way for teams to stay in sync without wasting time. You can learn more about scrum meetings and how it works in this article.

How to install Focus bot

• Install the bot to your Slack workspace. It takes less than a minute. Just click on the button ‘Add to Slack’ and allow the bot to do its job. You should only have an account in Focus before adding the bot in your Slack workspace. If you don’t have an account, then you might sign up here and return to Slack installation later.
• Edit settings (optional). You can change the time for running standups or questions. Also, you might choose channels for reports delivery or use asynchronous standups. You can perform these and other actions in settings as an admin.
• Using the bot. The Focus bot begins to work after installation. It will run daily standups and weekly updates according to your settings.

It’s not only about scrum meetings

We believe that employee recognition is another crucial area for building a great culture in the company. And yeah, Focus bot gives you leverage for using regular opportunities for creating an amazing atmosphere in the team. It helps your employees to be recognized for their accomplishments through the Focus platform.

Read the guide to get more details about Focus bot and how it works in Slack. 

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They’ve already achieved outstanding results in the area your organization operates. They are full of energy and tell anyone who will listen how awesome it is at work in your company. If you ask for working overtime, they do it – and happily. If you don’t, they unquestionably would if you did. They are the least likely to quit, and the most likely to pull others in your company. 

How did you do that? How did you create this team?

To answer those questions, let’s turn the clock way, way back — the time when the people were hired in your company. In this article, we talk about 5 crucial steps that help you to build a fantastic team.

1. Hire the best

You know, I don’t want to be captain obvious, but it’s easier to recruit the right candidates and give them all opportunities for achievements then hiring people whom you will be trying to motivate. The road from hundreds of resumes to your best employee is started with understanding the ‘right’ resume. 

Think about what’s really necessary for an individual to achieve the job’s goals. Define the job before hiring an employee. For example, persistence, listening skill, and learning ability often are more important for a sales manager than a degree from a cool university or work experience in your industry.

2. Company goals

To manage your team effectively, let’s try to do a little test. How many employees know your company goals? Just ask them about it. It’s crucial for team management that people know the main organization’s goals and understand how they participate in it.

Start asking employees about 1-3 main goals of your company. It gives a lot of insights into what people are thinking about the organization. Once you’ve understood all the opinions, keep going through the employee’s value. Show the individual how he or she impacts the company’s goals. It’s super important for people for getting value out of their job.  

Also, notice how different opinions you have now from your team members. Don’t forget to implement the workflow that helps you to make company goals transparent and show employees’ influence on it.

3. Personal goals

Alright! Now, that you’ve already built a transparent company’s goals in your workflow, let’s take the next step and create an outcome-driven culture. When approaching this, it’s really, really important to remember that employees do not want to devote their life to complete the company’s goals. They want to be passionate about what’re they working on and see their self-development. 

For that reason, your experience shouldn’t be defined by the milestones you create, but instead by the improvement of their life your company provides. Create individual development plans with employees that give your employees roadmap with measurable goals and timeframe for achieving these goals. You can read this article to get more information about individual development plans.

Take the time to get very clear on what kind of ‘better people’ your company makes. It will inform everything that follows from here, so it’s super important to get right. 

4. Communication

Communication often challenges for many teams. We receive a lot of new information in our email boxes and messengers. Everyone wants to get our attention in different ways. While you’re trying to avoid a lot of noise from various channels, it’s hard to build alignment across the teams.

You want your entire organization to be not only aligned around company goals but also has a workflow where everyone clearly understands each other. It’s hard, especially in that volume of communication. Many teams spend their time in the meetings to do their work better and build alignment. But you know that often meetings are not really productive. Regarding a Microsoft survey, an employee spends 27 hours per week for meetings. Wherein only 10% of employees called these meetings useful. People like to solve issues and make deals, but not discuss it.

When you design workflow for goals achievements, not discussing – it relieves a huge amount of employees’ energy and time. But how to set this kind of workflow, which reduces the time in meetings and synchronize the team? 

For each touchpoint, think about outcome-driven culture – what’s important to the company at that particular time? What the real goal of a meeting? In most cases, it’s planing, problem-solving, making decision, or synchronization with the team. And it ends with improving employees – the kind of people who can deal with all staff better than before that.

For most of these reasons, you can use a simple framework, which helps people understand what’s going and simplify communication between members. For example, you can use three questions to synchronize the team every day:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• What was the biggest obstacle?

You can use it in different cases either on short meetings aka standups or on online meetings via text. Also, you can set asynchronous conversation when everyone answers to the questions when it’s convenient for the person. It takes several minutes per day and helps to focus on the main goals. No long meetings – more time for work. You might even automate this process by using special bots or software like Focus that helps to run standups each day.

It’s only one piece of communication that you can implement in your workflow. Just start thinking about focusing on outcomes and simplifying current procedures. It gives you a lot of insights that the company’s processes, which were invented long ago, are not optimized for the current structure. 

5. Recognition

68% of companies who implemented an employee recognition system report a positive effect on employee engagement. At the same time, employees don’t feel recognized in most companies. There is a huge potential for managers on how you can increase employee engagement. Just implement a recognition system. To understand better how to do it correctly, we need to talk about common issues there.

The main problems with recognition are:

i. Wrong recognition

It’s kind of like a bad-suited jacket – you’re giving appreciation to the employee, but he or she doesn’t like it. For instance, a person can avoid public recognition because of a person’s modesty. Sometimes you can give appreciation either in the not right moment or situation. It’s a manager’s job to know the characteristics of each member of the team and understand how and when sharing appreciation. 

ii. Non-specific recognition

General “thank you” or “great job!” are good, but you know, it’s not the best way for appreciation. To get them, a significant recognition begins to be specific like “Thank you for your help with launching a new product, especially, with creating the awesome design in a short time.” Also, show them which value you recognize in their work.

How to implement a recognition system?

That’s why it’s crucial to implement a recognition system in the team that helps everyone to be specific and recognize co-workers at the right moment. You should understand the character of each employee in the team and the ways how they react to appreciation. The common practices for building recognition system correct are:

• Do recognition regularly
• Do public or private appreciation, depends on an employee character
• Do it online to write down this moment. It’s like a ’success diary’ with their achievements. It helps you to see the traction and motivates employees to reach the new accomplishments.

Sketchdeck says feedback is the key to navigation remote-waters and we agree 100%.

Conclusion

Building an amazing team is challenging for any founder or manager. There is no secret mechanic that you can use for creating a really powerful organization. It’s always about a combination of things where you should be the pro. To summarise crucial parts for team management: 

• Hire the best candidates
• Set clear company goals and ask your employees about its
• Create an employee development plan with personal goals
• Build a simple and outcome-oriented workflow in communication
• Implement employee recognition correctly

In Focus, we eat our own food while creating software that helps teams increase performance and build high-engaged culture. Our goal is to simplify workflow with transparent goals, clear communication, and employee recognition. In Focus, it’s easy to create a company and personal goals when everyone will be able to see how he or she impacts the company goals. In fact, managing a company is hard, and we want to make it better when everyone in a team gets benefits from that. 

Share in the comments below your experience on how to create an exceptional team. 

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Why employees hate their jobs?

There are many reasons why people don’t enjoy their jobs which impact on the final outcome. We consider three leading causes for teams where employees lose their motivation over time. However, there are lots of other core reasons why people don’t like their jobs. For example, an employee hasn’t found himself yet and isn’t an appropriate fit for the current position. Or perhaps a new worker doesn’t have the vital experience needed. We can also consider cases where employees work well in the early stages, but then they lose their motivation. Let’s try to figure out what’s going wrong.

Reason 1: They don’t know company goals

The first reason is about the company’s goals, particularly the employee’s understanding of them. I see many times when only a few employees in the company know the businesses goals. Research concludes that the majority of employees don’t understand them; in fact, they don’t understand why they do their job. Vital understanding of how goals impact on the business, what is of value and whats is not. How the worker can best align with company goals? They don’t know the answers to these questions.

So often, founders think that each employee clearly understands the company’s goals. A team leader can quickly communicate this through a 1:1 conversation with employees. Just ask people what the company goals are. It helps you to get the real status of employees’ vision.

To be specific why it matters, employees who doesn’t understand the company’s goals generally consider themselves as a small part of the system. In many cases, it impacts their level of motivation. It’s easy for anyone to lose a desire to work if he or she doesn’t understand their contribution and impact on the total results. 

Reason 2: Employees don’t get recognition

If you’ve had some recognition issues, you should know that it influences the whole team mood. Value of material motivation goes down by the time; in contrast, non-financial motivation means a lot for people. But managers often forget to give recognition to their employees.

Most articles and presentations about motivation focus on large things like a motivation program or corporate culture. It makes sense, but I want to underline that simple, basic things like recognition and qualitative feedback work pretty well. Yeah, it’s simple and gives superior outcomes, but often managers don’t do it. They have so many meetings and routines that they forget to provide feedback for their employees or colleagues.

Recommendations or some magical exercises don’t fix this situation because each manager knows what should he or she do. The only right decision in this area is implementing a feedback system every week. That is why we created Focus, which assists you in making employee recognition as simple and effective as possible. It allows team managers to be better leaders and helps employees receive consistent and well deserved feedback.

Reason 3: Absence of employee development system

Employee development is an essential process for improving motivation for long-standing team members. Routine jobs absorb many engaged team members. Each day repetitive tasks lead people to unmotivated behavior and drudgery. People generally don’t like it because it’s so boring. But we can’t replace people with robots for these routines jobs in many areas. Not yet.

That’s why it’s crucial to implement employee development. It improves people’s engagement and loyalty to the company. And I’m talking not only about training, but about constant practices for personal development every week. Managers should do a 1:1 meeting with employees to discuss their job and performance. 1:1 sessions help you improve employee engagement, not to mention, the opportunity to give quality feedback. Though weekly catchups you will know what’s important for your employees and what’s on their minds.

At Focus, we believe that people are the top priority for any company. Employees, clients, profit. These are vital factors for any business. And I believe that employees must come first because focus on your team helps to build a sustainable and long-term company. Focus on employees not only increases efficiency but also makes a great workplace for everyone in the company. It gives you as a manager superior outcomes in all cases.

How to increase employee engagement?

There are a lot of recommendations on how to improve employee engagement on the web like ‘how provide a beautiful environment, encourage flexibility, always be authentic’, and so on. It makes sense because it matters for people in all cases. But I want to talk about practical examples of what you could implement today.

Step 1: Measure current employee engagement

You should measure employee engagement regularly. It helps you investigate what’re your employees thinking about your company. And it’s an essential step for increasing engagement because if you can’t measure it how can you understand the outcomes of your improvements. One of the most reliable ways to do it is through Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), which is a survey to measure employee satisfaction.

eNPS is built around Net Promoter Score and has similar mechanics. You can find out different templates on the web or use eNPS module in Focus, which helps you understand what are employees thinking about your company. We provide anonymous eNPS survey to get honest feedback for improvements.

Step 2: Start doing daily and weekly standups

Unclear goals are one of the reasons why people lost their motivation. Create a workflow where everyone will be aligned with the company’s and colleagues’ goals. Simplify your teamwork without meetings, which often take a lot of time and distract productive employees. It doesn’t mean that meetings are a terrible habit for employees productivity, but it’s better to use modern tools and mechanics for team synchronization. For example, you can set daily and weekly updates in several minutes in Focus. Each event takes from one to five minutes per day for the employee, let alone that everyone will know what’s going on in the company.

Step 3: Improve employee development

To improve employee development, you should create the next two things:

• individual development plans,
• implement performance management.

Individual development plans give your employees roadmap with measurable goals and a timeframe for achieving these goals. People must have a clear vision of what should they do and what you, as a manager or founder, expect to see as outcomes of their work. Take time to discuss people goals and their development, which directly impacts on company success. Understanding performance metrics will help your employees to be more productive.

Another essential mechanic that every manager should do is one-on-one meetings with employees. Managers often don’t know what’s going on in an employee’s life. 1:1 session will help you to build reliable connections with employees and improve their engagement. It’s a profound topic of how to implement 1:1 meeting in the company, how to provide it with the best results, and which questions use in the meetings. We will consider this theme soon with more details.

Recap

Let’s recap some of the essential concepts to improve employee engagement.

1. Measure employee engagement

There’s only one thing that you need to benchmark your employee engagement against your own. If you can measure improvements to employees engagement over time, then you know you are working on it. To do that, we recommend providing eNPS survey at least one time in 6 months. How to provide eNPS survey? You could find a 3rd-party agency or use special software like Focus or an alternative. Check methodology and provider’s results, to be sure that it’s the best-suited option for you.

2. Set concrete performance goals

We recommend creating individual development plans and implementing performance management in your company. Also, managers should implement 1:1 meetings with employees weekly for improving performance in the company. 

3. Start doing daily and weekly updates 

Daily and weekly updates help your team stay in sync without meetings. It allows employees to understand their impact on total outcomes and keeps the whole team up to date with current projects. Remote employees are also able to stay in the loop easily and boosts feelings of inclusivity.

It’s hard to build a strong culture in a company, especially when the company begins to growth. It’s crucial for managers to use modern tools to organize their work and create a better work environment for employees. You can trial Focus for 14 days completely free to find out firsthand how effective project management software is for you and your team. At Focus, we help companies stay in sync without meetings and built a high performing culture.

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