| It varies week to week. I tend to run them fairly organically, and in general I prioritize using the time to ensure the staff member is getting what they need from me (which, by the way, sometimes means more time, which means we may cancel or cut short a 1:1 at the staff member's discretion). Typically I prep with a few work-related items I'm interested in--developmental goals I want to revisit, strategic items I want to talk about, things to follow up on from previous 1:1s (and yes, that means I keep notes from each session so that I can refresh my memory on what we've discussed, follow up meaningfully on items, etc). I usually lead in with just some casual chit-chat to break the ice and see how folks are doing. That might last 5 minutes or it might last 25 minutes depending on what the staff member needs that week. Some meetings end up being heavily focused on developmental stuff. Others may be hot tactical issues because the staff member needs help on a bunch of stuff. Most are a mix. What with COVID and working from home I've found myself much more regularly checking in on quality-of-life issues: How is your stress level these days? Is your workload manageable? How is childcare going? Is the family healthy? Partly that's to ensure the staff member knows we're supporting them, but it's also to ensure we have open lines of communication so we can nip burnout issues in the bud before they become problems. Now, do I cover all of these topics every single week? No, of course not. You might be surprised to discover that some managers are in fact in possession of basic common sense. :) But, using those notes I mentioned earlier, I try to ensure we're periodically touching base on these various topic areas so that we're making progress across various axes. And again: I asked my staff if we could go to bi-weekly and they said they'd prefer not to. I assume that means I'm doing something right. |