“Cancelling One-on-One Meetings Destroys Your Productivity” by Elizabeth Grace Saunders
Free Download
Clik here to view.
Molly: Welcome to the It’s About People podcast, this is Molly Kelley and I’m joined by co-hosts Suzi Alligood and Brandon Laws, and we are here to talk about an article I picked because it supports my philosophy of the world. I do a lot of culling things that support my view! It’s from the Harvard Business Review, I think it’s legitimate. And it’s basically written by a time coach named Elizabeth Grace Saunders called “Cancelling One-on-One Meetings Destroys Your Productivity.”
This dovetails nicely with something that I have been harping on for years. I train Leadership Essentials, which is one of our trainings. And actually, with almost all of our other trainings it fits in somewhere—the value of one-on-one meetings with managers with their employees. And it’s interesting because every time I bring that topic up of, Are you having regular one-on-ones? There’s always a few managers if not most of the room that groan and sigh and wring their hands over how much time it takes to carve out moments for your employees. Or I get comments about remote employees and how, Well, you can’t meet with them because they’re not in office! And it’s really interesting as you push back on them and ask them about how their days flow, it pretty much echoes the topics that she hits on in this article, that if you set aside that structured time for folks, things actually go more efficiently, more productively, people are doing the right work and relationships improve, as conversations flow a bit more easily.
But I was curious, since both of you are also managers, what your approach is and if you’ve heard similar feedback from other folks who are in a management position around the value or the challenges with one-on-ones.
Brandon: I’ll just go real quick, and I’d say that, you mention the relationship piece, that part is huge. I mean the development is one thing, what you get out of a one-on-one, but as a manager or even on the receiving end with my manager, if they’re on time, if they keep that meeting, they make the time for me, what that tells me is that they care about me, they care about my development, and I think for that reason alone one-on-ones are worth doing, and canceling them would probably crush me. Or, for the person that I manage, who knows how they’d feel about it, but again, it’s the feeling, it probably strains the relationship if you cancel.
Molly: Absolutely.
Suzi: So you’re saying it’s an important part of you feeling engaged and motivated?
Brandon: Absolutely.
Suzi: Right, so it’s an engagement opportunity right there. Yeah, I also think in a dynamic environment, which many organizations are, a lot of change going on, there are often competing priorities, goals are shifting based on changes, so if you’re not checking in with people regularly, to your point, Molly, people can get off track and not focused on the right work that’s really going to move your business forward. So I agree, for both of those reasons, to connect and engage with your employees but then also to make sure, like you said, that people are really on track and focused on the work that is going to meet your business objectives.
Molly: Yeah.
Brandon: I’m curious, because this article is all about how if you cancel it, you’re going to ruin productivity, but for those that do cancel or don’t have one-on-ones, what do they do to manage productivity in the first place?
Molly: You know, before we really instituted them—because at Xenium when I started 9 years ago, we didn’t have one-on-ones, that was kind of a novel concept. So we had meetings where we would meet with folks and check in but there was nothing like the monthly check-in that we have scheduled now. And I can remember lying in wait outside of Anne Donovan’s, my manager at the time years ago, office to grab her for a few minutes just to ask a few questions about projects, and the same thing with Tana and Suzi when they were in that role of managing me, where you would try to catch people, and that’s exactly what she cites in this article.
Suzi: Yeah, those are interruptions, too.
Molly: Yeah, because there’s not a scheduled time to save those questions up where you know you can touch bases, you wind up interrupting the flow as you’re popping in because work stops if you can’t get the answers you need. And there are times when, you know, you’re not just managing the relationship, you’re managing workflow. So I think Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
that’s a really important point she makes, that the productivity piece is a direct line to the time that you spend with people. She has a typically more aggressive schedule than we’ve recommended at Xenium, we typically recommend an hour monthly for most managers, depending on the size of the team. In this case, she’s saying even weekly, a half hour, or bi-weekly, a half hour. So that’s, again, more frequent touches, which I think a lot of us do informally, but in this case the process and the importance here is of formalizing that time, safeguarding it. To Brandon’s point, nothing cancels it. If the employee themselves cancels, I think that’s one thing, if they have a childcare issue or—
Brandon: Things come up.
Molly: They do, heavy deadlines, too—
Brandon: But if it’s a reoccurring cancellation, that would annoy me.
Molly: And I think it says something if the manager has to cancel on the employee versus the employee canceling on the manager. I mean, to your point, Brandon, we’re all busy, but there’s something about the statement it makes if, My manager is carving time out of her schedule to be with me, that’s a really value-adding, respective—
Suzi: When I think of productivity, it’s not just enhancing the employee’s productivity, but it’s happening with time management of the manager, right? Because the manager of people is doing their work, but they’re also leading and directing the work of others. So it’s a great disciplined approach to your own time management, to have those regularly scheduled meetings so that you can better manage and prevent those interruptions or ad hoc meetings and discussions that may come up more frequently when you don’t have a regular structured format for meetings.
Molly: Yeah. I want to go back to something that Brandon said, because I mention this a lot when we do our counseling or performance management classes, and that is, if you’re having more frequent dialogue with someone, the relationship is building, it’s so much easier, if I’m talking to you all the time, to deliver constructive feedback. The harder stuff—Hey, we’re slipping on this, How are you doing on your deadline on this—is a lot easier conversation to have if I’m meeting with you regularly for all the positive things, or just check-ins. How’s it going for you is less of a loaded conversation than, Hey, I’m going to have to pull you into my office for the first time in two months for any real kind of conversation. So it really is relationship-building and, I think, relationship-sustaining, and it makes the difficult conversations that much more easy if we’re having more conversations in general.
Suzi: Yeah. And I always think of the Gallup studies where they looked at organizations and their engagement levels in their employees based on how frequently those employees received feedback, and the employees who actually didn’t receive any feedback as opposed to just negative were way more disengaged. So even employees who are getting some kind of constructive or negative-only feedback were like four times more engaged than people who were not getting any feedback.
Molly: That always fascinates me, but it’s true! You see me, you know I’m here even if you’re not happy with how I’m doing.
Suzi: You care to some degree.
Molly: So the lesson here is to make sure you’re doing your one-on-ones, people! And we’ll post a quick template of our format on our podcast link, and we thank you for joining us!
The post Why You Shouldn’t Cancel One-on-One Meetings appeared first on Xenium HR.