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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So you are curious about what a one on one meeting is? Before we jump in, let’s zoom out a bit. Business is very often just pure chaos. It is doubly so for organizations that are younger, smaller, more agile or just plain scrappy. It is also this environment where founder CEOs and other self made C-level people don’t have a tried and true toolset and decades of experience to fall back onto. While OKRs, daily check-ins and such are all great, they don’t address the fundamental management problem young organizations are facing. One on one meetings are the definitive solution. Let’s dive in.

What is a one on one meeting?

One on one meetings are the setting where two people, manager and employee can talk freely about themselves, their pains, successes, hurdles and aspirations, the company, the market and life in general. It is the focused space that transcends firefighting, snarky comments on Slack, gossip and watercooler chatter. While these are all part of a healthy business, they can drown out the somber voice and the genuine cries for help. As a manager, your main task is to enable your team to be able to do their jobs to the fullest extent they can today and to grow tomorrow.

How will you know if someone is facing personal challenges that affect their performance? If they don’t get along with someone else in the company? If they have a trivial problem like not being able to set up their VPN and get no help from anyone? Yes, the one on one meeting is the ideal setting for these.

If you are interested in reading a book about one on ones and just about how to manage people in the software industry, I highly recommend Managing Humans by Michael Lopp.

The dos and don’ts of the one on one meeting

Do

• Set up a weekly recurring cadence
• Have it at the same time and the same place every week
• Make it at least 30 minutes long
• Start with “How are you?”
• Follow up on your action items by the next one on one meeting

Don’t

• Do not cut the meeting short
• Don’t make it a status update
• By no means should you share details with others without consent
• Avoid giving tasks in the one on one meeting
• Don’t EVER miss a one on one meeting

Now that we looked at some general dos and don’ts of the one on one meeting, let’s look at the three broad types of them. What should you expect and prepare for when you’re going into your first on on one?

The 3 types of one on one meetings

The check-in

In a healthy organization, most one on one meeting will not be a heated conversation. Instead, it’ll be more like an update on what’s going on, how’s everybody feeling, minor pieces of improvement and feedback but nothing major. Why should you still do one on one meetings if some of them will be nothing more than confirmation that things are going smooth? Precisely for that reason.

Imagine this scenario: your team member has consistently missed the daily standups this week which is unusual for them. What is going on? Are they completely demotivated? Checked out? Looking for another job already? You might assume the worst and thus as any good manager, you’ll concentrate on trying to solve these perceived issues and prepare for the worst. This will distract you from items that might truly need your attention but without more information you can’t prioritize effectively. Sure, you could schedule an ad hoc meeting with your team member, or try to catch him while getting coffee but these can easily come across as too overbearing.

Lucky that your organization does one on one meetings so you can meet and discuss anything. You’ll ask: “How are you?” and he’ll reply that he’s fine, maybe a bit stressed. Why is he stressed? Turns out he is moving house and the movers keep rescheduling last minute day after day. Is this something you as his manager can solve? No. Is this information going to help you prioritize. Oh yes. Now you know that you’ll just need to be more patient with him and the situation will resolve itself with time. In the meantime, you can help him out by subtly managing the expectations from the rest of the team and downplaying the effect of him being late rather than leaning into it. Your team member will feel like they are heard and even cared for, all thanks to the little weekly 30 minute one on one meeting.

The rant

I wish I could say that the update is the most common one on one meeting archetype. But I won’t. Based on my experience, especially when it comes to earlier stage, smaller companies, things are rarely smooth sailing and it will show. If you don’t have one on ones, any frustration that builds in your direct reports will lead to loss of motivation, decrease in performance, toxic behavior and ultimately a burned out team member. As a manager it should be your only job to prevent this and actually reverse it. Support your team members to perform better, grow into a better version of themselves, keep motivated, curious and engaged and ultimately deliver the maximum value possible to your customers and the business in a sustainable way.

Let’s say you decided to introduce one on one meetings, now you have a valve on the pressure cooker that is your organization. The thing is, you’re in the way of the hot steam coming out and you’ll need to know how to deal with it. So when you ask “How are you?” and the reply is less than convincing or outright hostile, you know you’re dealing with a rant. It’s okay, this is useful and you can do this.

Hint 1 – Just listen

First of all, listen, don’t try to solve every problem right away. A lot of times people just want to be listened to, to share their frustration, to feel like they are not alone. By being a good listener you’re already scoring points with your direct report. These are the first steps for a trusting work relationship. Once you think they are over the initial burst, do ask follow up question if you need to. Try to understand what caused the frustration. Is it another team member? A process that doesn’t make sense? Misaligned expectations? The person’s own shortcoming? Something you might have done? Or some completely external factor you have no control over?

Once you identified the likely cause, you can start to guide your team member to come up with a solution on their own. Don’t underestimate the importance of this. If people come up with a solution themselves they are much more likely to follow through with it and after owning the process of resolving any conflict, they will also own the win. Remember, the measure of success for a manager is the success of those they manage.

Hint 2 – Action items

At the end of a rant, you should be able to either come to a resolution in the meeting itself, or come up with a list of action items either you or your direct report needs to complete. It is very important that neither of you lose track of these as it is expected that progress will be made by the next one on one unless explicitly stated. Write these down somewhere where you won’t forget about them. Or you could try using a dedicated software solution for one on ones, more on this at the end of the article.

The disaster

What is an ongoing rant that seemingly has no resolution? Yes, it is a disaster. Once a person reaches a point where they seemingly have given up, it’s hard to turn back. When someone answers the “How are you?” question with an empty stare, sharing that they are completely unmotivated or that they feel depressed you know you’ve got a disaster on your hand. Lots of times people in disaster mode won’t even wait for you to ask your standard question, they’ll blurt out what’s bugging them. It can be that they say they can’t take it anymore, it referring to something they ranted about in the past but is still a problem. It can be trying to resign or threatening to quit. Or it can be simply a cry for help, without specifics.

Look, it’s a problem that the disaster is here. There should have been plenty of rants that led up to this and you failed to help the person resolve their conflicts. So what can you do about it? First of all, you need to reassure the person that their concern is your top priority (if it wasn’t before) and that you’ll work with them to resolve it.

In some cases, especially when this is just the latest in a string of disaster type one on ones, you will have to think about how the person fits into your organization. Sometimes, the best course of action for both parties is to amicably part ways.

Software for running a one on one meeting?

While you can run an effective one on one with just a pen and a piece of paper or a notes app, we think we have a better way. Making the most of your one on one meetings requires both parties to be on top of the topics they want to discuss, any action items that need a resolution before the next meeting and to see these evolve over time. Check out Focus to see how you can supercharge your one on one meeting.

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What does an ideal team mean for you?

First, each team leader should clearly understand what the ‘ideal team’ means to him or her. How many people are in their ideal team? How do they communicate? How do people set their goals and evaluate them? How does a manager evaluate how employees are performing? How many regular meetings do they need to stay in sync? How does each employee fit with company culture and values? What’s important for the leader and what’s not so crucial? In what type of team does the manager want to work?

It’s hard to achieve and create the ideal team, but the goal of this practice is getting a vision for yourself. It helps the manager to make decisions in hard situations, when the leader will be able to compare current conditions with his or her ideal scenario. And as you know, difficult situations are not rare occurance the life of a company.

Ok, let’s think that you did it. You understand your ideal team and its criteria. Great! Now we’re going to consider best practices for improving management in the team.

1. Transparency

You know this trendy word. Transparency. It’s all about the new way of communication between the company and an employee. You know, people don’t like to be a small piece of the big bureaucratic machine. People don’t like to do a job when they don’t understand why should they do it. But a lot of companies maintain this kind of communication. 

95% of employees don’t know their company goals. 

Wait for a second, think about it. It means that only 5%, including the founders, understand what’s going on in the company and what it wants to achieve. How do you think this impacts employee engagement? Do your team members enjoy being people who don’t understand company goals?

Transparency is a way of communication with your employees when you don’t keep secrets from people about the main events in the company. It helps you to improve employee engagement and makes team members more outcomes-oriented. 

Share with them all the main goals and events in the company. Give them a total picture of how things are moving. 

What can you share with employees?

• Company’s goals
• Current status of the projects
• Issues and struggles that your company has at the moment
• Why they are doing what you ask them

This is only basic list of things that you can share with the team. Some companies go one step further and create a totally transparent culture by showing all information to employees, including profit and loss.

It’s not a necessary step. However, for reasons good, you should be transparent and deliver clearly values, goals, and causes happening in the company. 

Well, we’ve now identified one way we’re improving employees performance, nailed down how to communicate it to them, and made it super easy to get started. Now we just need to actually, you know… provide that improvement. What should you do tomorrow? 

First, you could start to do daily and weekly updates. They’re online meetings that allow your team to stay in sync each day. It helps to know what’s happening in your team, and build alignment between members with 5 minutes a day. To do daily and weekly updates, you can use Focus. 

2. Continuous performance management

Go further. The next crucial thing for building top engagement culture in the team is continuous performance management. Old school performance management is a once per year activity. It’s all about providing performance reviews once or twice a year and setting goals for the next one for each employee. It’s mechanics are useful, but it doesn’t always work well. The reason for that is New Years Syndrome. Say that you decided to go to the gym more next year, but when it happens, you start putting it off and then give up. Sounds familiar? Yeah, performance plans have the same pattern. Employees generally forget about their performance goals in their daily routine. 

Instead, aim to flexibly accommodate all the behavioural conditions and use continuous performance management. Continuous performance management (CPM) is a new approach for increasing employee engagement. The real value of CPM lies in the sustained improvement of the employees while providing them with ongoing feedback, recognition, and coaching. 

That way, you will be acting as their personal trainer – totally invested in their improvement, and working to make sure their personal goals align with company outcomes. The more you can get people to connect with CPM, the stronger their results become. 

So how do you implement CPM in your workflow and how does it work?

First, CPM consists of three main areas, like ongoing feedback, recognition, and personal meetings for coaching people. Ongoing feedback helps to keep your finger on the pulse of employees thoughts and mood. You’re able to figure out what’s going on right now with your employees and you are aware of what’s important. 

The real value of recognition lies in the sustained improvement of employees engagement. You probably aren’t saying “thank-you” nearly as much as you should be. But it really matters for people. 

And last but not least, CPM are personal meetings for coaching people. It’s called 1:1 session and, you know, it’s a crucial part of employees performance. Few managers do it in their regular workflow, but it’s vital in improving personal outcomes. The right structure of a 1:1 meeting helps to provide more personal encounters for both team management and the employee.

At Focus, we’re using our own software to do it correctly. All three parts of the CPM implemented in Focus help companies stay on the same page and build high-performing culture. 

3. Employee development

Employee development is a process when you, as a manager, help an employee to improve a person’s skills and gain new knowledge or skills. Today, employee development is an essential factor for employee retention. 

Generally, employee development consists of three main parts: 

• Plan
• Learning programs
• Feedback

i. Plan

The first step is creating a plan for personal growth. So what’re the individual goals of the employee? What’re the person interests? What does she or he want to achieve this year? What do they want to do? It’s time to be a personal trainer for your employees. You can get answers to these question in private conversations. 

Once you understand personal interests, you can go further and create an individual plan that includes goals, a realistic timeframe, and detailed roadmap of how he or she will achieve it. 

ii. Learning programs

Depending on what your employees say, you’ll find out key areas that they want to improve. Time for learning. It can be group training or personal courses, or both of it. The main point is to tailor your learning program to individual’s needs, but not on trend-led ideas.

iii. Feedback 

Building a system of regular employee feedback is a crucial piece of high-performing culture. When people perceive qualitative feedback from their manager, it’s practically impossible not to be engaged. In the exact same way, it makes sense for employees when they understand that their feedback about the job will be considered by the manager or the team. 

Ok, ok, that’s enough celebrating feedback for now. But how to implement feedback routine in the company workflow as smooth as possible? It’s the question that each manager should think about. It seems simple but don’t undervalue it. A rule like “you can tell me everything that you’re thinking about” generally doesn’t work well. Employees often have top priorities in their job that should be done. It means that an idea ‘to go and talk with the manager’ becomes top priority when something critical happens. I don’t think you want to wait that long.

In that way, you should implement the workflow feedback routines as general tasks. Another side of that, people don’t like fill reports and spend a lot of time writing it down. That’s why it should be as simple as possible. For example, we create lightweight check-ins at Focus that requires only five minutes per day. It’s several key questions about a person’s results for the last day, which an individual regularly receives in email or messenger. This approach doesn’t take a lot of time, helps to focus on the key results, and allows employees to get praise for their work. The last point is a treat for individuals because they like it when other people appreciate them. You can check here to find out more details about Focus. 

Conclusion

Team management is a challenge for managers and founders because communication with others has the potential for misunderstanding, especially when the company is growing. It impacts on team’s motivation when employees are starting to lose sight of the company’s goals and vision. Three best practices that improve performing culture:

• Transparency
• Continuous performance management 
• Employee development

Focus, is a continuous performance management platform, which helps companies build high-performing culture. We provide an easy to implement continuous feedback loop and create transparent outcome-oriented mechanics in your workflow. And best of all, it only takes 5 minutes per day for an employee to share their results and stay in sync with the team without meetings. It helps you to focus on what matters. 

How do you increase team engagement? Let us know in the comments below. 

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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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