Though seemingly universally maligned, meeting culture seems to be everywhere. In addition to being unproductive, it’s also expensive: Companies lose $25,000 per employee to unproductive meetings every year.
Burnout is rampant, return-to-office mandates have people demoralized, and work/life balance is largely absent at many organizations. People leaders and individual contributors alike want to make things better, but many are at a loss as to what they can do to improve workplace dynamics. One strategy I’ve found effective is to transform one-on-ones to be less about status updates, and more about meaningful and impactful connection and unblocking.
Provide Status Updates Asynchronously; Use One-on-One Time to Unblock
I encourage people leaders to solicit status updates in an asynchronous structured form/survey and use one-on-ones as meaningful connection time to unblock employees and focus on their biggest challenges and concerns. This makes employees feel heard and understood, and the one-on-one an effective use of their time, while the leader still gets the update they need (in a structured format that is more easily rolled up and time-saving for them).
I advise collecting this information in the form of a structured form/survey, for consistency and posterity. You can request from your employees, 24 hours before a meeting, structured updates that they can update weekly. I always include the following:
- What’s most top of mind for the employee this week?
- Their biggest wins of the week
- Their biggest pain points and barriers, open questions, and concerns
- Color-coded progress updates for each of their projects: On Track, At Risk, or Behind
- Expected completion dates and percentage time spent on each project this week
- Start/Stop/Continue fields:
- Start: What they’re not doing that they want to do more of next week and going forward
- Stop: Things that are going poorly or they’re unhappy with and want to stop
- Continue: What’s going well this week that they want to keep doing
- What do they think their action items and priorities should be for next week?
- “How can I best help?” or “What can I do that would be most helpful?”
This way, well in advance of the meeting, you already have what you need to know about their progress and project status, blockers, areas they’re stuck on, and where they most need help. As a result, the one-on-one can focus on meaningful connection and providing actionable guidance to get them what they need to get them unblocked and respond to their top concerns.
Improve Employee Ownership and Productive Sharing
To optimize employee performance, I’ve found that one-on-ones work best when they’re about the employee, not the manager. By having the employee effectively set the agenda by sharing the details above, having the explicit purpose of the meeting be about unblocking them and meeting their needs, and having them propose their priorities, leads to greater ownership. They feel their work is less happening to them and outside their control, but rather that the meeting is for them, and they have some agency over what they’re doing. I’ve found this maximizes productivity and morale.
Quickly Identify and Correct System or Process Bottlenecks
You may find through the information you’re collecting from employees in this structured update, especially with respect to the blockers and start/stop/continue responses, that all your people have variations on the same challenges. This suggests a broken or suboptimal process that is easier to see (and sometimes more comfortable for employees to talk about) in writing, rather than during a (potentially uncomfortable) live conversation.
People are generally more forthright and direct in writing, and it gives them the opportunity to collect their thoughts more effectively. Once shared and identified, employees can be unblocked, and they feel better heard and understood, as you’ve taken action on their feedback. They feel more appreciated, and morale is improved. If associated identified challenges are bigger strategic issues, having that information in writing enables you to quantify it and make a more compelling case for change come strategic multi-year planning time.
Everything You Need for Performance Reviews, All in One Place
One of the nice corollary benefits of doing things this way is that you have everything you need in one place come performance review time. No need to go back to old scattered notes—you have structured updates you can roll up in the same format for all your employees, all together, which helps you quickly (and more accurately and with less recency-bias) complete performance reviews come review season.
Maximize Value and Productivity While Reducing Burnout
This minor change to one-on-ones maximizes the value of the interactions and improves productivity and morale, while building closer connections and reducing burnout. Employees who come into such meetings feeling blocked leave feeling seen, heard, and empowered. This also nurtures employees’ feelings of trust, which the Harvard Business Review has identified as the most important characteristic of effective leaders. Both productivity and retention improve.
If you’d like to optimize further, you can leverage generative AI technology to take and distribute notes after the meeting to ensure everyone is on the same page, saving time in the process.
By having asynchronous structured status updates and making one-on-ones more about strategic unblocking and meaningful connection, you maximize the value of these meetings and create a time-saving, productivity, and morale-boosting win-win for everyone involved.
