One-on-One Meetings: How to Engage Better With Your Employees
Managers must be able to determine when to step back and when to get involved. While managers need to trust their employees, they also need to take an active role in guiding and coaching their employees. Employees can discuss any issues they have as well as celebrate their successes in one-on-one sessions. But they can also be a challenge.
Let’s take a look at some tools available to a manager — including how one-on-one meetings are best for coaching and how they help increase team engagement!
- Understanding their take on the situation
A manager should never utilize one-on-one to simply inquire about the progress of a set of tasks and goals. For you as a manager, it’s critical to comprehend a team member’s current perception of his or her performance concerning the objectives. It is up to you to offer an anchor for an employee to open up and communicate by asking how they see the present situation.
In addition, it also helps you to customize your coaching sessions to align the way they work best with the changes you’re both hoping for. After all, the endeavour is to bring him or her up to pace with your company’s working environment and thus improve his or her overall performance!
2. Motivating the team
Coaching needs both motivation and engagement. Your role as a manager and the leader of the team is to develop one-on-one connections with staff that lead to increased productivity. People who are highly motivated feel that they can be honest with their managers and seek approval for their work. People often become disengaged because of the lack of communication between them and their managers. One of the major problems with having low motivation is that it can be contagious and spread throughout the workplace. Employees may actively disengage and stop caring and working as hard as they should, and morale can drop significantly.
When an employee feels appreciated and respected, he or she will feel motivated to continue working toward achieving team goals. This—not surprisingly—is one of your main responsibilities as a manager.
3. Recognising the positive aspects
“Nice job on the proposal,” you tell me, and I beam with pride.
These may seem like innocuous coaching moments, but they’re also examples of criticism disguised as praise. When feedback is wrapped in a nice little package, it’s sometimes easier for other people to hear because it seems less judgmental. But we’re not talking about the compliment sandwich, because that coaching method frequently devolves into shallow and superficial flattery that comes across as dishonest. Nobody wants to receive insincere praise. Most people want to be appreciated for who they are, what they do, and where their passions lie.
So, take your time thinking about particular things that are improving and let your staff know you notice and appreciate them!
4. Discussing the future options
When planning your next coaching session you need to know what success would look like for both yourself and each of the individuals. Declaring your future options ensures that you and your team members think likewise when it comes to expectations, as well as giving them a clear knowledge of the practical measures they can take to improve.
Also, the following steps towards the goal should be discussed and agreed upon by both parties – discuss what is fair to anticipate given their workload and the intricacy of the changes being implemented.
5. Recognising the obstacles
The set of challenges and problems that team members are presently dealing with to attain their desired success state are referred to as blockers. Many problems or challenges that team members experience can be remedied with alternatives that they just haven’t considered.
A good manager always pulls the team’s attention back to the genuine challenges they’re dealing with and encourages them to use their imagination to come up with new solutions.
6. Committing to learning
Lead by example. Make commitments to developing your skills and abilities. For example: By learning new technologies and developing your abilities, you can ensure that your entire team is up to speed on the newest technology.
Now that we have established the basic template of a one-on-one meeting for coaching, it is important to know how to kick off your session.
Watch how huminos OKR software provides the feature of scheduling one-on-one meetings with teams & individuals to keep a check on the progress of their OKRs.
đź’ˇ A one-on-one meeting benefits from predetermined leading questions. Outlining your coaching questions upfront is essential to making the most out of your one-on-one sessions.
The following are some examples of questions you can ask your employees for coaching.
- What are your thoughts about your recent performance?
- How do you feel about your commitment to your team?
- What are your perceived flaws?
- What do you think your strengths are?
- What do you think is working for you and what’s not?
- What are some of your recent favorite projects?
- What do you believe is preventing you from achieving your goals?
- What do you believe is the most essential aspect of your professional development?
- What abilities do you hope to acquire? (or what talents are you honing right now?)
The following are some examples of questions you can ask your employees on how you can help them improve.
- Is it possible that I’m unwillingly impeding progress?
- What can I do to assist you in removing your blockers?
- How can I make the objectives or expectations more clear? What can I do to assist you in achieving them?
- Do you want more or less frequent follow-ups from me?
I hope that these questions help kick off a great conversation and get everyone pointed in the right direction. You can always adjust the course based on what kind of feedback you’re getting from them! If you do, make sure you document any changes in the coaching notes.
Conclusion:
The art of coaching is a skill that has been in demand for decades. With remote working teams and 83% of companies in the USA adopting hybrid work weeks, it is becoming increasingly clear that coaching your team effectively is one of the keys to success.
Modern organizations expect managers to coach their team and they do not (and cannot) have all the right answers. The best time to coach employees is during one-on-one meetings where you can provide insight, support, and guidance. You need to help your employees figure out the problems and solutions on their own.
The art of coaching can be intimidating for managers who are not sure how to go about it. The above-mentioned questions help you to outline your one-on-one sessions while the tips provided in this article will help to make a framework where you take an active role in guiding your team members.
