Examples of One-on-One Meeting Agendas for Managers
At Duuoo we believe, that employees are the most important part of a modern workplace. Attracting, nurturing and retaining the best talent is key to succeeding in the marketplace. Over the last decade, technology has globalized and escalated the battle for talent — employees are nowadays less bound to their home country due to the availability of cheap flights, the development of immersive communication and advances made in connectivity enabled by the Internet.
This increased global competition makes it even more important to nurture the most important assets of our time: people. Yet, many managers are still not putting in the work needed to build and sustain an engaged and satisfied workforce. According to Gallup, less than one-third of the American workforce is engaged in their job — only 34% according to their latest study.
How can you as a manager make sure that you are taking the right action in this new competitive landscape?
In the following, we will take you through a manager’s best tool in this global fight for talent: the one-on-one conversation. We will guide you through all the how, why and ifs of this powerful tool and provide you with ready-made agendas you can start using right away. Furthermore, we will provide you with two examples of one-on-one meeting agendas for managers, that you can use or take a starting point in when having one-on-one meetings with your team members.
In the numbers-driven economy of today, it is not hard to figure out why so few managers are doing it right: it can be difficult to quantify the effect of being a good manager. This can often result in the manager deprioritizing one-on-one talks and feedback loops to make room for operational work and focusing on deadlines. This is a vicious circle — leaving even less time for the human-centric parts of managing people.
Engaged employees produce more and achieve better results, and furthermore, they will be less prone to leave your company and may even campaign and showcase your company externally.
According to a study by the Society for Human Resource Management, employers will need to spend the equivalent of 6–9 months of an employee’s salary to hire and train their replacement. That can end up being quite a lot of money; for instance, an employee with a salary of $60,000 will cost the company anywhere from $30,000 to $45,000 if he or she quits.
So how can you as a manager ensure that your employees are productive and remain engaged? Recent research has shown that one-on-one meetings are one of the best ways to foster an engaged workforce:
It is important to realize that a one-on-one meeting is not the same as a performance review or salary negotiation, etc. Instead, a one-on-one meeting is an informal talk about how things are going. It is the employee’s meeting — not the managers — and should be used by the employee to vent out frustrations and to better guide their manager on how they feel the manager could support them.
Note, if now you want to jump straight to the one-on-one meeting agendas created by the Duuoo expert team, please go to the place of the original post here.
The Shift Towards a People-first Culture
Over the last 10 years, a transformation has taken place in the business world. It used to be that companies would focus primarily on profits and work backwards from there. While optimizing profits is still the goal for most companies today, a shift in focus started happening around 10 years ago when companies started adopting a customer-first mindset.
Instead of focusing on profits first, and then customer experience, companies reversed their priorities. The goal became to optimize the customer experience as this turned out to be a better way of increasing profits. As products became more complex and as connectivity improved with the Internet, recognition of the positive effects of having happy customers improved by many orders of magnitude.
Now, 10 years later, the world’s most successful companies have gone a step further back and realised that by adopting a focus on employee engagement, the rest will naturally follow. Talent is more important than ever and it is for solid economic reasons that companies like Google are taking good care of their employees — most of whom are part of the millennial generation — and are laser focused on improving their employee experience.
The new millennial workforce expects a lot more from their employers in return for their hard work and dedication than was the case with previous generations. A good paycheck is no longer enough. The new millennials:
- don’t care about traditional hierarchies and expect to have ‘autonomy with responsibility’;
- are less loyal to their workplace than previous generations. They may be more inclined to feel that they are doing the company a service — not the other way around;
- are always connected and this goes for their work as well;
- indeed, they might check their Facebook during the day but they will also answer emails before they go to bed;
- care who they work for and what the vision of the company is;
- prefer informal, honest relationships with their superiors — and want to feel like their ideas are heard.
Good communication with their manager is a key part of creating a satisfactory work life for the millennial generation. Do not leave it up to chance that you might talk about these things — make it a priority as a manager to conduct one-on-ones regularly!
“In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. It is a true pleasure to work in an organization such as this. Every person can wake up knowing that the work they do will be efficient, effective and make a difference both for the organization and themselves. These things make their jobs both motivating and fulfilling.” — Andreessen Horowitz
But how? The following section will introduce you to some basic rules to follow when conducting your one-on-one meetings. These are important to read as they are not always intuitive. Many managers feel an instinctive need to use these one-on-one meetings to give rather than to take feedback.
