One on One Meeting

One on one meeting: a definition

A one on one meeting (الاجتماع الفردي), also called a one to one meeting, is a short, recurring meeting between an employee and their direct manager. It is given over to that employee’s work alone and to whatever is standing in its way. It is not a session for updating the team on where its projects stand.

Who the time in a one on one meeting belongs to

One rule shapes everything else about a one on one meeting: the time belongs to the employee, not to the manager.

The manager has other channels for finding out how the work stands. There are the reports, there are the tools in which the work is tracked, and there is the team meeting. Through any of these, the manager can learn how far the work has progressed.

The one on one meeting is the only channel in which the employee sets the agenda. In the reports, the tools and the team meeting, the employee answers what is asked about the work. In the one on one meeting, the subjects on the table are the ones the employee brings to it.

When a one on one meeting turns into a review of tasks, it loses something that cannot be made up from anywhere else. A review of tasks gives the manager what the reports, the tools and the team meeting already give. What it pushes out is the employee’s agenda, and the employee’s agenda has no other channel in which to be heard.

What is discussed in a one on one meeting

The subjects of a one on one meeting are these:

• What is blocking the work. It may be a decision that is still pending, an authority the employee needs and does not hold, or an approval that is still awaited. Each of the three holds the work up, and the meeting is where the employee can raise it with their manager.
• Priorities, when they compete. They come to the meeting when several pieces of work press on the employee at once and cannot all come first. The meeting covers which of them takes precedence, and also who is to decide between them when they clash.
• Feedback in both directions. It runs from the manager to the employee, and from the employee to the manager. The one on one meeting is the natural place for that exchange, because it is the meeting in which the two of them sit together on a regular footing with nobody else present.
• The employee’s path. It comes up less frequently than the other three subjects. It covers where the employee is heading on their career path, and what they still lack in order to get there.

What undermines a one on one meeting

A one on one meeting can lose its purpose in four ways:

• Repeated cancellation. It is a message in itself, and the content of that message is that the employee’s time can always be put off. No one needs to say this to the employee in words. Each cancellation says it for them.
• Turning into a status report. The meeting then becomes a repetition of what both parties already know, and that weighs on both of them. The manager listens to an account of work whose position the reports have already shown. The employee spends the time giving that account instead of raising what the work needs.
• No follow up. What is said in the meeting and then not followed up teaches the employee not to say it. An obstacle that is raised, and then left exactly where it was, shows the employee that raising it changed nothing.
• An intermittent rhythm. A meeting that is held only when there is a problem turns the very fact of holding it into a signal of concern. Once the meeting is tied to problems in this way, being invited to one tells the employee that something is wrong before a word has been spoken in it.

What keeps a one on one meeting going

What keeps a one on one meeting alive is a set of practices:

• A fixed slot. It is not moved except when there is a genuine need to move it.
• A short, regular duration. A short meeting held at regular intervals is preferable to a long meeting held at wide intervals.
• Written notes that both parties can see. They are open to the employee as well as to the manager, rather than held by one side alone.
• The same question, asked every time. It is put by the manager in these terms: “What do you need from me that you have not received?”

That question brings the meeting back to what it was set up for. The definition gives the one on one meeting the employee’s work and whatever stands in its way as its subject, and the question asks the employee for exactly that: what they need from their manager and have not yet received. Asked at every meeting, it returns the agenda to the employee each time, which is where the rule about whose time it is places it.

How a one on one meeting relates to continuous feedback, the stay interview and the exit interview

The one on one meeting is the practical vehicle for continuous feedback. That feedback needs a regular occasion on which it can be given and received, and the one on one meeting supplies that occasion.

The one on one meeting is also what makes a stay interview a natural extension of a conversation already under way, rather than a sudden event that takes the employee by surprise. Where the employee and the manager already meet on a regular footing to talk about the employee’s work, a conversation about what keeps the employee in the organisation continues something familiar to both of them.

An organisation without regular one on one meetings may not hear about what is blocking its employees until the exit interview.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.