1-to-1 guide

1-2-1 Meetings: A Regular Check-In for Growth and Development

One-to-one (or 1-2-1, or 1-on-1) meetings are regular check-ins between two people in an organization, typically a manager and an employee. They are a valuable opportunity for both parties to give and receive feedback, stay up-to-date on each other's work, resolve issues, and plan for the future.

Why is it important to do 1-2-1 meetings, from a manager's point of view:

• Increasing personal and team productivity
• Building trusting relationships
• Reducing team turnover
• Effective investment of working time
• Timely response to questions that arise
• Understand project health

Principles of 1-2-1 meetings:

• Employee-oriented agenda
• Regularity and relevance
• Privacy
• Dialogue
• Demonstrating empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand one's own feelings and the feelings of others.

It is important that the employee can talk to you frankly and understand the personal value of such meetings.

Situations that can be discussed in 1-2-1 meetings

Overwork/ burnout

• Your employee frequently stays late at work
• Works on weekends
• Outwardly visible

Conflicts in the team

• The team declares that they do not want to work with this person
• An employee complains about the team or several team members

Does not share company values

• The person challenges values, decisions, and actions
• Criticizes the company’s ways of working and approaches

Uninteresting tasks

• There are no interesting tasks or new technologies to use
• Teams cannot define their OKRs

Cadence

It is recommended to have 1-2-1 conversations once a month with your project team members and engineering subordinates.

In cases where active engagement is needed, e.g., issues on a project, active mentoring, preparation for a performance review, and onboarding, you can set up meetings more often. Once a week, or even daily sync-ups.

How to make your 1-on-1 meetings productive

The full cycle of 1-on-1 includes:

• Preparation for the meeting
• Collecting information and feedback from the team/PM of the project.
• 1-2-1 scheduling and forming a meeting in the calendar (with agenda!)
• The actual holding of the meeting
• Recording the results of the meeting in the form of a summary, as well as in a follow-up for the employee.
• Planning the next meeting based on the results.

During the meeting:

• Always acknowledge and praise the employees for their achievements and successes.
• If there are problems and errors, you could analyse them together and create an action plan if it’s needed
• Give feedback about the company, the work, and the team.
• Ask the employees what difficulties they face in their daily work and how they would improve the work process.

When choosing questions for 1-to-1, it is important to consider:

• The context of the specific project (customer conditions, project specifics)
• Personal characteristics of a particular employee (character, type of behaviour, temperament)
• The realism of the promises made and your areas of responsibility

Examples of questions to ask:

• What has been good lately/since we last met?
• Are you fine with your “work-life” balance?
• Are you feeling your development? How is it manifesting itself?
• What achievement are you proud of?
• What interesting things have you learned recently?
• What help do you need now?

What we don't need to talk about:

• I don't advise you to say, "OK, you already know all the positive things, let's talk about what needs to be developed.”
• Discuss only problems or "burning" tasks. There are regular rallies for that. you need to elevate a little bit above the current situation and devote time to your interaction and development.
• To get caught up in sorting out past conflicts-remembering when someone was wrong. This is not constructive and does not lead to anything.
• Giving a negative evaluation, not in a face-to-face meeting.
• Sensitive topics. In 1-2-1 meetings and the context of communication in the company on a professional level, we make it taboo to discuss "sensitive" topics such as terrorism, politics, religion, gender identity, racism and sexism, harassment, eating disorders, ableism, and ageism.

Feedback

Positive Feedback

If the results of the feedback do not show any remarks to the employee, but there is gratitude, praise, and a wish to continue "in the same way," you should definitely talk about the positives. If, as a manager, you can see where you can still develop the employee, then you should talk about points for growth.

Corrective Feedback

If, based on the results of the collected feedback, there are comments/suggestions/desires to make changes to the employee's work.

We give feedback in a detailed but constructive way (we can use the "sandwich" technique).

• Highlight moments for which you should praise the employee.
• We show them what they need to correct/improve/work on. We give constructive criticism, analyzing the specific situation, without generalizations.
• Talk about the situation/task where the mistake was made.
• Ask for your view of the situation/reasons why it happened.
• Consider how we can avoid/timely correct such cases.
• It is necessary to express support and readiness to promote in every possible way the changes that we have talked about above.

How to give feedback properly:

You can use the "sandwich" technique, the principle of non-violent communication, and the GROW and STAR methods available; the main rule is that there should be more praise than criticism.

Meeting summary

It is a nice style to make notes about your conversations. Track your agreements and plans.

• Introductions (date, topic, and meeting participants)
• What the meeting was about? What decisions were made
• Next steps (dates, responsibilities)

A structure that can be used:

• The mood of the employee (in one word)
• What the meeting was about: the main topics (a, b, and c)
• Action items of the meeting/arrangements

And some personal findings regarding 1-to-1 meetings:

• Regular 1-2-1 meetings should be the employee's favourite 30 minutes 😊
• A meeting providing useful feedback is key.
• The focus of the meeting should be positive, so the employee feels supported and can openly trust you.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I'm confident that you'll have productive and nice 1-2-1 meetings.

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