Employee Engagement Meeting

Employee engagement meetings, commonly referred to as 1 on 1's, are an essential forum where managers and team members communicate and give feedback to increase engagement. These meetings represent a crucial part of the employee work experience and are important for the employee's commitment, development, well-being and engagement.

Managers have a significant influence on increasing employee engagement. And frequent interactions and meaningful conversations from casual to formal engagement meetings give managers an excellent opportunity to impact their employee's perceptions of everyday work.

In these meetings, each employee or team spends time with their manager or immediate supervisor. Getting those engagement conversations right is vital, but it's not always easy. Without any employee engagement meeting template to help, things may not look great. That's why managers should come prepared with a ready-to-go template.

Below, we discuss what your employee engagement meeting template should look like.

What's the purpose of employee engagement meetings?

Engagement meetings aim to check on progress, address challenges, exchange constructive feedback, celebrate success, and offer development coaching. These meetings are an opportunity for managers and employees to talk about their work performance and experience and ensure it moves in the desired direction. According to Gallup, employees who spend regular one on one time with their manager or immediate supervisor "are more than twice as likely to be engaged at work."

Engagement meetings allow quick and simple checking, provide unique chances for private discussions, make employees feel cared for and valued, build empathetic work relationships and create a problem-solving platform.

Regular engagement meetings are an effective tool for creating a good psychosocial environment. Scheduled conversations create a safe platform for transparent communication where employees and managers can have a dialogue about important issues and highlight problem areas and successes.  This means roadblocks can be quickly spotted and addressed and create a culture where each employee feels heard, seen, and included, contributing to enhanced employee engagement, lower staff turnover, and higher productivity.

How To Have Successful Employee Engagement Meetings

To allow every employee in an organization to contribute to the conversation the best way they can, it is always best for managers to have templates for engagement meetings. An engagement meeting template provides a perfect place to fill in specific questions, data, discussion points, or feedback you want to give each employee. A template keeps you in line while ensuring the conversation is tailored to fit the person you are engaging.

It is also beneficial to use a common platform like Slack or Google Calendar for the entire organization to plan and document the meetings. This helps support managers in their role and prevents cases where meeting notes are lost or interpreted differently by other participants.

While every employee is different and all engagement meetings should be tailored to each team member, here are the elements that an employee engagement template should include:

Extra tips- Engagement meeting guidelines:

• Consider each employee's current work ethics, level of work morale, stress, satisfaction, etc. and plan strategies around that.
• Track employee's status of goals
• Figure out the bottlenecks that need to be addressed for them to achieve the set goals
• Focus the discussion on specific issues
• Provide effective and constructive feedback
• Offer coaching and learning opportunities based on the employee's requirements.
• Share adequate information about the company and team that'll help the individual employee.

Summary

Regular engagement meetings are important for making employees feel supported and valued. The meetings are an essential component of a holistic engagement strategy and help managers and supervisors grow into coaches. As a manager, you owe your employees the time and attention to support them and help them attain success in their job positions. Engagement meetings provide the perfect opportunity for this practice.

However, engagement meetings require more than simply dedicating time and appearing at the venue or jumping on a video call. For full benefits, engagement meetings need to be intentionally designed - which is where a meeting software like Fellow can help! Learn more about Fellow