Meaningful conversations between managers and their employees is key to high performance and to drive organisational change.
Conversations about wellbeing, career progression as well as regular check-ins are essential in ensuring your employees are motivated and feel valued. But often, managers need support in understanding what a good conversation entails, what should be discussed and how often you should have one.
Embedding a culture of meaningful conversations
Practical guide on how to improve the conversations managers are having with employees and embed a culture of feedback.
Table of contents
More meaningful conversations between managers and employees
CHAPTER 1
Having regular meaningful conversations with your employees is critical for high performance. In this chapter we explore how you can get your managers and teams to have more regular performance. We look at the 5 types of conversations that contribute to a culture of high performance.
Give your teams more meaningful conversations
How do you implement and measure genuine cultural change? It’s a big question. You may have a vision in mind for a big shift in your organisation’s culture: one that will improve efficiency, performance and engagement. How do you persuade your CEO that you can deliver it, embed it and make it work?
How Do I Get Managers to Have Regular Performance Management Conversations?
Not many managers relish the thought of performance management conversation, and neither do their employees. Yet, there is a way to change that attitude. Most performance management conversations begin and end the same way — stuffy formalities, form-filling, and an awkward handshake.
How to have a good check-in
CHAPTER 2
Check-ins are essential between managers and employees. This is one on one time with your employee to understand how they are doing, what their workload is like, and prioritise any tasks. Check-ins should be meaningful and should give your employee the opportunity to discuss and resolve any problems they are having. In this chapter, we explore how to have a good check-in and share our popular one-to-one meeting template for managers.
Give your teams more meaningful conversations
How do you implement and measure genuine cultural change? It’s a big question. You may have a vision in mind for a big shift in your organisation’s culture: one that will improve efficiency, performance and engagement. How do you persuade your CEO that you can deliver it, embed it and make it work?
Using One-to-One Meeting Templates to Motivate Performance
Any performance management system needs to incorporate regular one-to-ones to be truly effective. Read our advice on one-to-one feedback and how to get the most out of a check-in.
Normalising wellbeing in check-in conversations
CHAPTER 3
Wellbeing plays a crucial role in employee engagement. If your employees are looked after, and feel good at work, they will be more engaged and perform at their best. A key part of ensuring your employees are feeling well, is having regular conversations with them about their wellbeing. You may want to do this by normalising talking about wellbeing conversations in your check-ins. As you start to do that, it may be better for you to have separate catchups that are dedicated solely to talking about wellbeing.
It’s important to draw a distinction between mental health and wellbeing. Conversations about mental health may seem overwhelming especially if you are not a mental health expert. However, wellbeing is much more holistic and anyone can talk about it — including managers. For many people, talking about wellbeing may be out of their comfort zone, which is why in this chapter, we will share prompts and tips managers can use to have a good wellbeing conversation.
How to get your managers onboard with employee wellbeing
They key to employee wellbeing is getting managers on board. If organizations really want to prioritize employee wellbeing, they need to understand the types of managers in their organization and how they can support them to have wellbeing conversations.
Campaign for Real Conversations: Wellbeing
- What a good wellbeing conversation looks like - How can we ensure we’re taking care of our people’s wellbeing at this time; furloughed staff, people worried about being sick and worried about their jobs - Great examples of staying connected with your people
From Zero to Hero – how to get your managers to support wellbeing
During this webinar we’ll explore: The importance of having manger – employee wellbeing conversations How can HR support line managers to have wellbeing conversations How to turn skeptical managers into advocates How can tech support wellbeing
How to have conversations about career progression
CHAPTER 4
Career conversations are really valuable for employees and managers to understand how an employee’s career goals can align with the orgnaization’s objectives. For an employee, career conversations should help them understand whether there are any progression opportunities for them or what skills they can learn in the organization to get to where they want to be in their career. For managers, it’s a way to align the goals of the employee with the goals of the organization and support their employee in every way to get where they need to be.
Campaign for Real Conversations: Career
- What a good career conversation looks like - Real-world examples where organisations are still having these conversations despite everything that is going on - How can we ensure people are still developing while working from home - How can we make sure people feel supported and rewarded?
How to prepare for a comfortable career conversation with your manager
It's essential you prepare for a career conversation if you are serious about progressing in your career. Although talking about it can sometimes feel uncomfortable, they are most likely to not happen if you don't bring them up. Here's how you should prepare for your career conversation.
Realignment conversations to improve poor performance
CHAPTER 5
Some of the most difficult conversations managers can have with their employees is realignment conversations. Realignment conversations are more commonly referred to as underperformance or poor performance conversations. We prefer to call them realignment because rather than focusing on the poor performance, we believe these conversations are an opportunity to realign your employees so that they feel more engaged at work. Most performance issues arise when there is a lack of engagement and motivation. Getting to the root of what is causing the demotivation and making changes to help your employee, will improve productivity and employee performance. In this chapter, we look at how you can have these conversations with your employees in a way that’s useful to you both.
Campaign for Real Conversations: Wellbeing
- What a good wellbeing conversation looks like - How can we ensure we’re taking care of our people’s wellbeing at this time; furloughed staff, people worried about being sick and worried about their jobs - Great examples of staying connected with your people
How to get your managers onboard with employee wellbeing
They key to employee wellbeing is getting managers on board. If organizations really want to prioritize employee wellbeing, they need to understand the types of managers in their organization and how they can support them to have wellbeing conversations.
From Zero to Hero – how to get your managers to support wellbeing
During this webinar we’ll explore: The importance of having manger – employee wellbeing conversations How can HR support line managers to have wellbeing conversations How to turn skeptical managers into advocates How can tech support wellbeing
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