How our One-to-One tool can keep your company culture on track

One-to-ones are more than just typical meetings; they are a great performance tool that can help you get the most from your team. Perhaps more importantly at the moment, they are also a crucial means of learning how your direct reports are feeling, both about their role and their personal life, which gives you a chance to act to keep them engaged and motivated rather than risk letting them want to look for a job elsewhere.

A one-to-one meeting is a regular catch up between a manager and the people who report directly to them. These are usually informal and give both you and your direct reports the chance to review progress and discuss any issues that you want to. It’s a great way to ensure you can support your people well, and to make them feel well-supported. Some managers like to do these weekly, others fortnightly or monthly. The meetings are usually half an hour or an hour long.

One-to-ones are different to appraisals. An appraisal would usually be less frequent—perhaps every 6 months or year. An appraisal is typically more formal and will involve a set of questions which companies define for themselves. And an appraisal is designed to assess longer term goals and ambitions for your team, to provide feedback on how well each person is meeting your expectations and what development opportunities there might be for them at your company.

Because one-to-ones are so much more frequent and less formal, they offer an excellent chance to raise ways your people could do things better without making a big issue of it- and while the issue is still fresh enough for you and your people that it’s both easy to remember and hopefully also to fix. A one-to-one is therefore an opportunity to cover potentially difficult issues as part of a wider meeting rather than needing you to set up a meeting just to cover problems, which can be much more difficult.

So, if they’re that useful, we should all be doing them frequently, right?   Lots of us are—but in the real world, and especially when so many of us are working from home, it is all too easy to forget to book one in, or to skip it because something urgent has just come up, and then you forget to reschedule it. Scheduling frequent one-to-one sessions with each of your employees can not only help your team grow in confidence and skills, and but can also help you understand individual strengths, as well as weaknesses, as you try to work out ways to optimise your business performance. If you want to get the best out of your team, doing one-to-ones regularly will really help.

One-to-ones can also get missed because you’re not sure how to run one effectively. Although they are widely used today, plenty of managers have never done one and may not know how to start. But here at citrus HR we know that you value your employees and want to boost employee engagement, team morale, and productivity as much as possible.

So, we’ve added a new one-to-one feature into our HR software. This makes it super easy for small businesses like yours to schedule, structure, and make the most of one-to-one meetings.

What does citrus HR’s one-to-one software do?

Our one-to-one feature lets you set up regular catch ups with your team as frequently as you want to. Our software will even remind you when it’s due to take place. And you can use it to store notes for each meeting, which you can find easily if you ever want to check back in future.

You’ll find each of your team’s one-to-ones prominently on their employee file in our software.

How can our one-to-one tool help you?

Making time in your calendar

Time is the one crucial aspect that you give to your team to ensure a positive and productive workplace. Using our one-to-one schedule tool, you can easily choose a date and set a reminder for your meeting.

You will also be able to view previous meetings and know how much time has elapsed since your last one-to-one on your employee’s profile. Making time to schedule a one-to-one will show your employee that you have time for them and share the same values.

Getting the most out of one-to-ones

Like most things, preparing properly for a one-to-one with one of your team is the best way to make sure you cover all the topics that you both wish to discuss. So, our software makes it quick and easy for both you and your direct report to add notes about the meeting at any time. We’ve even built in the chance for you to attach any supporting documents that are relevant to the meeting.  You can both see all the notes.

This will let both you and your employee quickly review details of the meeting in advance. Then hopefully you can both relax and enjoy a productive meeting.

It’s a good idea to acknowledge your employee’s development, reviewing feedback received, and notes taken, will enable you to work together to meet not only their goals but also those of your business.

Short-term vs. long-term goals

One-to-one meetings are most effective when they are regular and consistent. This works well if you use them to have an on-going conversation about each person’s goals. And it shows your commitment to building a stronger team. Our software makes it really easy to optimise your sessions by viewing your team’s goals when scheduling each meeting, giving you time to think about how to help each direct report meet their objectives.

You can change the status of the meeting at any time- normally that will be to mark it as ‘completed’ after each one-to-one, so that you can review progress before your next session.

One-to-one meetings are a useful way to keep continuous conversations going between you and your employees. Not only will they allow you to deliver a consistent performance experience for your team, but with our software feature to help you, engaging with your employees will be seamless.

The content of this blog is for general information only. Please don’t rely on it as legal or other professional advice as that is not what we intend.