Hosting Effective One-on-One Meetings with Know Your Team

Being a leader in any company comes with its own set of rewards and challenges, and Top Floor is no different. One-on-one meetings with my team are one of my favorite parts of my job. It’s my time to finally sit down and connect with the team on anything they want – discussing client work, career goals, or just catching up on life.

A few months back, we began using a tool called Know Your Team (KYT). This tool is designed to make it easy for managers to have effective one-on-one meetings, grow their team, and provide honest feedback. The tool also provides other fun culture-related features (we’ll get to these later).

Here are a few of the features I’ve found most helpful with the tool:

Agenda & Notes

KYT allows both the manager and employee to add an agenda for each meeting. This has certainly helped ensure we cover everything we need to during our time together. During the meeting, there are places to organize discussion notes, action items & next steps, and private notes. I’ll often find myself referring to previous meeting notes often to remember specific conversations and action items for both myself and my employees.

Ideas for Questions

If you feel like your one-on-one meetings are falling flat (or even if they are rockin’), this bank of questions is super helpful! There are categories of questions that KYT provides managers to help with various types of conversations: Feedback, Issues, Career Direction, and Personal Connection. What’s nice about these questions is not only are there a TON to choose from but they vary as far as the level of depth. Some are simple surface-level questions while others are more to spark a deep conversation. Whichever questions you choose, they are designed to help create effective one-on-one meetings based on each individual employee.

Meeting Agenda Templates

Seriously, they couldn’t make this any easier. Typically, I’ll “start from scratch” to create my own agenda, but if there’s a specific goal for your meeting you can choose from a templated layout of questions to discuss:

Culture & Social Questions

This feature isn’t one-on-one related, but certainly a favorite by our team. It allows anyone in the company to pose questions. Some can be more business-driven such as “Do you think we are behind the curve in anything in particular?” or “What benefits would you like to see what we don’t currently offer?” While others can be prompted completely from employees. Today’s question at Top Floor was “What’s your go-to Karaoke song?” I can only imagine what these responses will be!

Wrapping Up

These were just a few of my personal favorite features, but there are many others that I haven’t even tapped into yet! I feel like at this point I need to end with say “this is not a paid promotion”…but really, it’s not! This tool has just been so helpful to our management team, we couldn’t help but share it with you. We’re always looking for new ways to improve our leadership styles and this tool was certainly a step in the right direction. If you’re looking for an effective manager to guide your career in the right direction (and you have a passion for digital marketing), we’d love to start a conversation!

Until next time,

-Emily