TLDR: My 15min 1-to-1 sessions with our team and how we keep it focused and meaningful.
One of, if not, the biggest challenges when it comes to managing a remote team is missing all the small subtle body language, tones and nuances you would normally be able to pick up when you’re face-to-face with someone. I was going through a challenging point with my team early on, and had voiced my concerns to a friend who suggested that, for the first 6 months of anyone joining the team, we should setup a regular check-in session.
This idea really changed the way our team now interacts. Initially, we had setup these check-in sessions every month with either myself or the person’s direct manager. However, my friend suggested we go further and make it a fortnightly process to make sure they get comfortable in their new remote environment. It’s also a great way to figure out if someone is suitable for remote work (more on this in a future post). So I decided to roll it out with my team first. Our aim was to create a focused session with structure otherwise it’s really impossible for your employee to tell you (or their manager) what’s really going on.
So I started to leverage this very simple 4 question template shared by Zapier and it makes the conversations last between 15 – 30mins (usually because I ask a lot of personal questions to understand how their life and home situation are going and other stuff to build rapport). The 4 questions consist of the following (this is a summarised version of the Zapier one):
Question 1 – What are you Excited about?
These questions can be work-related or not, I usually don’t specify because everyone has a life outside of work. The idea behind this question is to open up your team member to look for something they are excited or can look forward to. Most employees will not really get that excited about work, and it doesn’t matter if our conversation veers away from work, because honestly, I want to know what excites my team. It makes for a more fun engagement and you see a different side of people when they’re excited, be it for their new child or even launching their first project. However, as with life, there is always a flip side and usually it’s balanced with something not so good and this is where we go into their worries.
Question 2 – What are you Worried about?
I think it’s important to not rush into this part too quickly. Often I see it’s always a mad rush (especially for the men out there) to fix the problem, no matter what it is. A lot of the time, your team member might just share their worries with you on surface level and you need to dig a little deeper to understand what the worry is actually about. So this section takes a lot of patience and some coaching skills to ask the right questions to get to the root of the issue. I find it also helps me to really understand the inner workings of the team and their worries or frustrations. It is important for me to understand my team members, so that I can do what I can to alleviate these problems, which nicely leads to the next question…
Question 3 – What can I do to make your job easier?
This might be weird at first and maybe your team won’t give you helpful responses to begin with, but stick with it. I see this as allowing the employee to really open up and ask something they might not have felt like they could before. It is also a great way to do continuous improvement on your processes as it is the team that is running the day-to-day operations and as management, you might miss the details that could be repetitive or unnecessary. Finally, this leads up to bringing the spotlight back on them.
Question 4 – What is 1 area you can improve in to be better at your job?
To me, this question is really, really important, because it shifts your team member’s mindset from ‘let’s just do enough to not get fired’ to ‘what can I do to be better’. This also allows them to focus on this one area and to see measurable improvements in their work and delivery. I find this answer quite critical because in our team we really want people to progress and to learn and if they feel they are at their peak, then I think it’s either they aren’t taking this seriously, or not suited for the team.
These are the 4 questions I run through with each of my direct-reports and it may not be the best way, but it’s a WIP (work-in-progress) to have my finger on the pulse of my team. I believe a team functions well when they are looked after and when they feel the work environment is safe for them to give feedback and experiment in order to continually grow and improve.
How does this work when you scale out to 50 or even 100+ people?
I honestly don’t know yet, but I think its still scalable so long as you have each manager looking after 5-6 people each.
I’ll let you know when we get there 😉
If you want a copy our template, just go here and download your own here to use with your team.