Designing and Launching an Effective 1:1s Program - Introduction

Welcome to Reflektive's HR Guide to Designing and Launching an Effective 1:1s Program! We will be talking about strategies, best practices, and tips that you can use to successfully implement Reflektive's 1:1 Conversations tool to your organization. Please review all the following sections carefully. Each of the chapters are broken down into separate articles, which are linked in the table of contents below.

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In the modern workplace employees are a company’s most valuable asset – and biggest expense. Finding ways to optimize their performance should be considered worth the investment. However, employee performance is largely dependent on effective management. Once employees are onboarded it is up to their manager to coach that employee to their fullest potential. The relationship between the two is so fundamental to good business today it’s hard to recall a time when it wasn’t so.

Productive and meaningful employee-manager conversations (often called 1:1s) help set clear expectations, communicate where one’s work fits in the big picture, provide and welcome feedback, and help people grow in their career. The most common myths inherited from traditional performance management is that 1:1s are unproductive, hard to scale, too informal, and that focus should be on quantitative forms of performance management such as performance reviews.

Often, ineffective 1:1s are a result of managers not knowing what their direct reports are working on and that focus should be on quantitative forms of performance management such as performance reviews. Common mistakes include treating the meeting as a status update – something better accomplished via email – or managers using the meeting to speak rather than listening to questions and comments from the direct report. However, while 1:1s can add great value to your organization, there is little documentation for HR professionals to learn how to design, launch, and measure a successful 1:1 program based on their organization’s unique needs.

This guide explores the crucial components of an effective 1:1 meeting, and how this simple – yet powerful – management process can help drive motivation, productivity, and alignment throughout an organization. Furthermore, this guide will provide a blueprint for HR Professionals to design and launch an effective 1:1s program.