Cristian Scorohodco

Introduction

Efficient management is the process of collaborating with the teams and creating efficient conditions to deliver projects by solving problems and minimising the risk. Despite plans, scope, financing and metrics, efficient management can also be defined by the ability to efficiently collaborate with team members. One of the most efficient ways to monitor the team’s state and improve collaboration is by planning and conducting one-to-one meetings.

Why should one-to-ones be conducted?

One-to-one meetings should be conducted periodically to monitor and assess the team’s state. During the one-to-one sessions with the team members, multiple factors can be evaluated, such as collaboration, team mood, status checks and tips from the team members on how to improve the processes.

Periodic one-to-one meetings with the team members act like “health checks”, allowing managers to get insights on team collaboration and make informed decisions intended to improve the delivery process.

Who should conduct one-to-one meetings?

Conducting one-to-one meetings is primarily recommended for project managers, team leaders, senior and executive management roles. Additionally, one-to-one sessions can be conducted by senior team members who have extensive project experience or experience working within a company.

Why are one-to-one meetings important?

Conducting one-to-one meetings is essential for a wide range of reasons, a few of which are described below.

Establish a good relationship with colleagues

Project delivery is based on an efficient and productive collaboration of the team members. One-to-one meetings help to establish a good relationship with colleagues, which promote openness and trust — key factors of efficient communication and collaboration.

Strengthen the collaboration with team members

One-to-one meetings create a connection with the team members, which enhances collaboration. Fluid and transparent collaboration with the team dramatically improves the efficiency of the delivery process.

Collect useful insights

Multiple insights about project, team and individuals performance can be collected during one-to-one sessions. Having a well-prepared agenda allows the interviewer to collect lots of helpful information.

Current project state, team’s mood, positive & negative factors and trends, ideas and insights on team members’ collaboration and many other factors affecting the team’s collaboration process can be gathered during one-to-one sessions and subjected to further analysis.

Identify issues and process improvement ideas

One-to-one meetings are helpful to identify issues and problems that hinder the team’s ability to deliver and identify useful process improvements that can be implemented to enhance the team’s efficiency. Recording, analysing, prioritising and implementing such process improvement initiatives is one of the crucial factors of a team’s success.

Monitor the health of the team

One-to-one meetings can be treated as team health checks, allowing the interviewer to identify and monitor trends that might affect the team and team members. Collecting and analysing the data on the team’s mood, achievements and issues, positive and negative factors, provides the ability to quickly solve the problems and deploy proactive measures that will prevent the issues from happening in future.

Tips for efficient one-to-one sessions

Follow the next tips to efficiently plan, conduct and analyse the outcomes of the one-to-one sessions:

• Plan one-to-one sessions in advance, adjust to team member’s calendar
• Always have an agenda and/or questionnaire; try informally following the agenda during the one-to-one session
• Timebox the sessions to make them efficient; usually 30–45 min timebox is recommended
• Avoid formality; try making one-to-one sessions a friendly professional conversation rather than a status report or interrogation
• Create a predictable schedule of one-to-one sessions with the team members; conducting one-to-one sessions once in 1 to 2 months is recommended
• Consolidate meeting notes after the one-to-one session, store them in a repository
• Create process improvement plans based on the team’s feedback; ideally — make them a part of the retrospectives

Endnotes

One-to-one sessions provide a handy mechanism to collect the relevant on team performance, receive and analyse process improvements ideas, enhance the collaboration with the team members and, as a result — improve the team’s ability to communicate, work together and efficiently deliver projects.