Keeping the pulse of your team, both in terms of happiness, well-being, and performance is a cornerstone to a team’s success. Combining this with the promotion of a culture of continuous improvement is a winning combo for any organization.

One-on-one conversations proved a super powerful way to realize these 2 objectives and to establish a deep connection of trust with each of our team members.

How can you organize 1-1 conversations?

Frequency: Every 4-6 weeks

Agenda: 4 open-ended questions

• What gave you energy the past 6 weeks?
• What worried you or drained your energy the past 6 weeks?
• What can you improve?
• What can we improve as an organization?

The 1st two questions allow getting a good feeling of how the person feels (both personally and professionally). The latter 2 questions should lead to 1 personal & 1 organizational improvement point.

What makes this work:

• The frequency allows one to remember the details and concrete situations, while still giving enough time for improvements of the previous conversation to become visible. This creates a continuous improvement cycle.
• Because the questions are known upfront, participants can prepare, which leads to better answers (especially for introverts).
• Do not make this an evaluation, rather set this up as an open conversation with the common goal of improving, both at personal and organizational level. The question “What can you improve?” will often already trigger self-reflection that overlaps with the feedback you want to give as a leader. If not, this is a perfect occasion to give (realistic and constructive) suggestions.
• If possible, alternate with 2 different personality types (eg. more extraverted & more introverted) or roles (eg. more technical, more business) to capture complementary insights and put different emphases
• Allow personal elements to be part of the answers: a family matter may be causing a positive or negative impact!

Outcomes:

• Anticipatory action on impediments before they become too big (and possibly become a reason for leaving)
• A continuous source of ideas for bottom-up organizational improvement (that may otherwise be missed)
• Deep trust between the people in the team/organization and their leaders(hip)

Related Techniques

Team feedback like done in retrospectives helps to establish a continuous improvement cycle on the team level. One-on-ones should not replace but rather complement these retrospectives.

The core quality quadrant is a way to help shape the feedback into a constructive conversation and set realistic improvement goals. This is especially useful if team members find it hard to formulate improvements for themselves and benefit from some guidance (question 3 of the proposed agenda).

As an example: when someone is detail-oriented (the core quality), the pitfall is spending too much time on details. It could be a good exercise to delegate part of the work (challenging the core quality), without overdoing that either, as it would trigger the allergy of that person

Core Quality Quadrant Model explained

Core Quality Quadrant Model helps you to gain an understanding of the mutual relationships and communication interactions.

ToolsheroPatty Mulder

A happiness survey (e.g. once every 6-12 months) is a questionnaire that may contain a (lot) more questions on the different aspects of working for the organization. When done right, this will give a good indicator of people’s state of mind, ambitions, and intention to stay with the organization. This is an interesting way to obtain more quantitative (and hence comparable) metrics about the team, especially in larger organizations.

A formal evaluation (eg. once every 12 months) is a fixed moment to discuss the compensation package and performance of a person (none of the feedback should come as a surprise if you do the 1:1s!). Having a fixed schedule for these meetings (vs. waiting for people to ask for a raise) prevents introverts from not getting the compensation they deserve.

And if you do not have the means to keep on giving people raises: know that salary is a so-called dissatisfier: people will only become unhappy when they do not have enough, but will not stay happy when they get more if other elements like interesting work, growth, … missing. So do consider other recognitions like additional training budget, different roles (titles), …