One-on-one touch points are the meetings that managers and employees have with each other on a regular or semi-regular basis. In our experience, at most organizations, just having the meeting at all is considered success, but our point of view is that these one-on-one touch points are one of the most powerful mechanisms through which managers can engage and inspire their employees. That means, we care about optimizing these touch points.

In our mind, optimized manager/employee check-ins are meaningful conversations through which managers and their employees develop authentic connection and trust. We know from our coaching conversations that this isn’t always the case. Managers are often overextended, underprepared, or unable to focus their full attention during the touch points.

For many of the leaders we coach, they’re doing the best they can as their company deals with massive organizational instability and change. There are some layoffs, and then all of a sudden they’re managing (what feels like) 100 people when they used to manage 5. It’s hard for employees to get focused and dedicated attention from their managers, and even harder for those same employees to give their managers feedback, especially if the check-ins are sporadic and sub-optimized.

Since check-ins are so important, we wanted to make sure managers are empowered with a diagnostic tool to evaluate the quality of the one-on-one conversations they’re having with the employees. Managers can complete the diagnostic to evaluate how well they’re doing in leading these critical meetings.

What do you notice about your answers? There are likely some things you’re already doing well as well as areas of improvement. Do an experiment and change one thing up differently for your next check-in.

Additional Resources

The Inspired Check-Ins card deck is an intuitive tool that makes it easy to have more meaningful touch points.

The Manager/Employee Check-In Conversation Prompts can get you started with some relevant questions to ponder during a check-in.