Structure, cadence and ownership for the recurring conversation between a manager and each person who reports to them. Built so the half hour develops someone, instead of restating what is already on the project board.
Left without structure, a one to one drifts towards whatever is most urgent in the room. Work gets discussed, the manager leaves reassured, and nothing about the person’s development, workload or intentions has been touched. Across a year that adds up to a great deal of time spent exchanging information both parties already had. The remedy is rarely more meetings. It is a standing agenda, ownership sitting with the employee, and a short list of topics that are always covered.
Establish what one to ones look like now: frequency, who cancels them, what gets discussed and what never does. The cancellation pattern is usually the most informative part of the exercise.
Agree a standing agenda and a realistic frequency by role type. A fortnightly conversation that actually happens is worth more than a weekly one cancelled twice a month.
Equip managers to run the conversation, including the harder parts: giving developmental feedback, responding to a workload complaint, and answering someone who says they want a promotion.
Agree how the cadence is monitored and what happens when it slips, so the practice survives its first busy quarter.
The one to one touches three components of the Chrysalis Talent Management Maturity Framework: Performance Management, Employee Engagement, and Learning and Development. It is the point at which all three are either delivered or quietly dropped. An organisation can run a well designed appraisal cycle and an annual engagement survey and still lose good people, if the conversation that happens every fortnight is only ever about tasks.
A standing structure covering work, wellbeing, development and career, with guidance on what belongs in each part.
Recommended frequency and length by role type, pitched at a level the organisation can sustain.
Questions and prompts for the conversations managers find hardest, including underperformance and promotion requests.
A short guide that puts ownership of the agenda with the person being managed.
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A recurring scheduled conversation between a manager and a person who reports to them, held separately from project or task updates. Its subject is the person: their work, their development, their workload and their intentions.
Reliability matters more than frequency. Fortnightly suits most roles, weekly suits new starters and anyone in unfamiliar work, and monthly can be enough for experienced people in stable roles. A cadence that is kept is worth considerably more than a shorter one that is regularly cancelled.
The employee. When the manager owns it, the meeting drifts towards what the manager needs to know, which is a status update under another name. Employee ownership also surfaces topics a manager would not have thought to ask about.
[TO CONFIRM WITH VERITY: is this manager training, a framework and toolkit handed over, or both? The deliverables listed on this page imply documents, while the process section implies live manager enablement.]
[TO CONFIRM WITH VERITY: typical elapsed time, and whether there is a follow up review point after the cadence has been running.]
They are where performance management actually happens. The formal cycle records decisions, while the one to one is where expectations get set, feedback lands and problems are caught early enough to fix. Using them that way works well. Turning them into a monthly appraisal does not.
Verity is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD with more than twenty five years in HR, across Tesco, Nissan, TUI, Camelot, BRE, Lundbeck and the IET, working with managers in organisations from a few dozen people to many thousands.
A short conversation establishes whether the issue is structure, manager confidence, or a cadence nobody has the capacity to keep. Each of those needs a different answer.
