Check-ins are the backbone of agile performance management. A check-in is a one-on-one meeting between a manager and a direct report, that should happen on a weekly or fortnightly basis. From a manager’s point of view, check-ins serve many purposes, like:

To employees, most of these benefits are equally important. But also, they can:

One interesting framework to guide the check-in, or one-on-one, is to let it be, predominantly, an employee meeting. According to Ben Horowitz, author of The Hard Thing about Hard Things, “The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting.”

Not all check-ins are alike. Even tough they should happen every week or two, the agendas are different for every meeting. It doesn’t make sense, for example, to have career discussions every week with your direct reports: chances are these expectations won’t change that much in such a short time frame. Conversely, it makes no sense to talk about pressing issues on a monthly basis. Pressing issues should be discussed when they arise. Therefore, we’ve proposed a way to structure check-ins so that they remain productive and useful throughout the year.

In a very simple sense, topics accumulate in certain meetings. So pressing issues are discussed whenever needed. Task priorization and effort should be monitored in every meeting, as should the general level of happiness and well-being of the employee. Bi weekly, the manager should add broader questions to the 1-on-1, such as a discussion about the results the tasks produced (like monitoring KPIs and business metrics), as well as consolidating ongoing feedback that might have been received by the employee in the past weeks. General information gathering should also be done. On a quarterly basis manager and direct report should discuss the bigger picture, especially in faster paced companies: how the employee’s career is progressing, what are next development steps, general coaching guidance, etc. Lastly, bi-annualy, or yearly, a discussion about the allocation of scarce resources can take place, where promotions, bonuses, and raises, are addressed, as you can see on the picture below:

In order to help managers structure their check-ins, we’ve compiled a question bank that should uncover the right information from direct reports. They are generally grouped by topic, and can be modified, of course, according to need.

Happiness:

Career/Future:

Results:

Behaviour:

Information Gathering:

Compensation:

Have the employee register the main takeaways of the check-ins in some system like Qulture.Rocks or Google Sheets. It will build up a very rich history of the employee’s performance and life within the company, for future consultation. Having the employee specifically register the takeaways serves the important purpose of empowering her to take ownership of her development and performance, as opposed to “acting like a whiny baby”

Set out the agenda upfront. Let the employee know what’s the goal of the meeting, and ask in advance if he has pressing issues to be discussed. This will both force her to prepare for meaningful discussions, and also to think through whatever should be bubbled up

Let the employee speak. Many managers make the mistake of overwhelming their reports with so much information. Check-ins should generally be a servant leader’s opportunity to hear and help, and not to talk and preach

Don’t force the meeting to go on for a specific amount of time, like an hour, if there’s nothing to be discussed. Alternatively, don’t let it extend beyond the allotted time, which should generally not exceed an hour. Managers can reserve certain halves of certain days for their religious one-on-ones, which can’t be canceled

If you’re a CEO, you should NEVER, EVER, skip one-on-ones, or be sloppy about them. The sloppiness will spread like wildfire down the organization, and in no time everybody will be skipping theirs. You should ALWAYS set the tone, which dovetails nicely into the next point

The CEO, and only the CEO, should train management on conducting their 1-on-1s. By running his great 1-on-1s with his direct reports, the CEO will logically be a step ahead in disseminating the right practices down the company, but it isn’t enough: the CEO should personally explain the hows and whys of perfecting 1-on-1s to each and every manager in the organization, so the idea really gets spread and calcified in people’s minds. The CEO, and this should go unsaid, can’t outsource management - his main responsibility - to HR

In his “A Good Place to Work”, Ben Horowitz discussed the importance of one-on-ones, by telling the tale of one day when he discovered one of his managers had left six months go by without having check-ins with his direct reports. He concludes that he had failed to persuade his VP by telling the what, but not the why. In the end, he threatens to fire the VP if he doesn’t get his check-ins done fast, and here’s why:

“was it really necessary for me to make such a dramatic speech and threaten one of my executives?

I think it was for the following three reasons:

When things go well, the reasons to stay at company are many:

When things go poorly, all those reasons become reasons to leave. In fact, the only thing that keeps an employee at a company when things go horribly wrong—other than needing a job, which isn’t so applicable in the current macro environment—is that she likes her job.

There has never been a company in the history of the world that had a monotonically increasing stock price. In bad companies, when the economics disappear, so do the employees. In technology companies, when the employees disappear, the spiral begins: the company declines in value, the best employees leave, the company declines in value, the best employees leave. Spirals are extremely difficult to reverse.[ˆfoo1]”

http://www.bhorowitz.com/a_good_place_to_work/