Keeping a tab on employees’ feelings is essential for managers everywhere. Yet, #managers often struggle with maintaining high levels of employee engagement. While many mantras float around that will supposedly amp up employee engagement in your team to new levels, many are found to be faulty and sometimes even counter-productive. When working on employee engagement, we need to tread a fine line – engage the employee but do not disrupt their flow.
And how do we do that? Typically, we can talk to them. Effective communication is a simple skill that brings a plethora of benefits. You can ask them questions about work and seek progress reports and updates regularly to know where they are heading. Taking that one step further, you can ask if they are facing any difficulties and then try to resolve them. But if you take too many steps, you might end up micromanaging them inadvertently!
Too much interference from the management hampers employee autonomy and, therefore, reduces their productivity. And so, when looking for innovative solutions to your employee engagement problems, you should be aware of the pitfalls of some of those methods. Also, you need to look for strategies that bring you closer to your team. It should help you build emotional connections that pave the way for productive professional relationships.
You can look into some hacks for boosting employee engagement here.
Effective employee engagement hacks include providing guidance, support, and recognition as the employee progresses. While these are the ideas we should follow, we must look for actions that help us achieve these. An everyday activity that can help us do all of this – and much more – is one-on-one meetings.
One-on-one meetings with your team members are interactive sessions conducted with individual team members. They are like check-ins with your team. In these meetings, you can discuss work-related and adjacent issues affecting your team’s performance. It can include topics like their performance at work, experience with team members and environment, etc. You can also ask them about their goals for the next period and the learnings in the previous one.
Overall, one-on-one meetings are a great addition to any manager’s toolkit because of their broad utility, which expands constructive feedback, open communication, and opportunities to provide coaching to team members. Managers who conduct one-on-one sessions are seen as approachable and understanding by their team members. However, getting one-on-one meetings right is a challenge for many managers.
Typically, managers struggle with one-on-one meetings because they need to figure out where to begin. Before conducting one-on-one sessions with your team, you must prepare thoroughly about the topics you’d like to discuss. You can also list a few questions that you would like to raise. I think it will help you find direction in the session. Moreover, some managers cannot generate maximum value from one-on-one sessions with their teams. It happens primarily because they need to act on the insights drawn from the conversation, or they may be unable to reach conclusions from conversations.
If you are facing any of these problems, you need to read these six secrets to make one-on-one meetings with your team effective.
To go one step further, you can also download the free one-on-one meeting toolkit with sample statements, questions, and tips to ace your first one-on-one meeting. It will also help you strategize and plan the course of further discussions with your team.
In this journey, you will surely need some course corrections, and Risely has the perfect tool to help you. Take the free one-on-one meeting self-assessment to understand what you are missing. Get actionable insights, identify weak areas, and enhance the efficiency of one-on-one meetings with your team in simple steps.
While you may not have the best one-on-one meetings with your teams initially, you will learn a lot about yourself and your team while striving for better results. The relationship you build in that process by acknowledging vulnerabilities and collaborating will be worth more than anything. Those are the bonds that will help your teams get through hard times.
Building teams that are always together is tricky. It is a daunting task for managers to understand and accommodate numerous people. So, start working on one-on-one meetings today! One-on-one meetings are one of the most effective managerial tools for employee engagement that helps managers grow massively. Intelligent insights from these sessions enable managers to become influential leaders with loyal teams.
#leadership#leadershipdevelopment#managerdevelopment#oneonone#effectivecommunication#engagement#leaders
