Rob Wheatley

One-to-One Agendas

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We have just released a great new feature for one-to-one meetings: Agendas.

For the 30% of our customers who don’t have one-to-ones turned on (yes, 70% of customers do have it turned on, in fact it’s one of PerformanceHub’s most popular features), one-to-ones is a PerformanceHub feature that enables managers to set-up regular one-to-one meetings with their direct reports; both the manager and direct report can record notes for each meeting.

With this update, you can now enable one-to-one meeting agendas, to help ensure that meetings are focussed, and that the right topics are discussed.

Here’s a screenshot of the new settings in PerformanceHub’s set-up page:

1-2-1 meetings settings

 

 

The keen-eyed would have spotted there are 3 new options to choose from when setting up one-to-ones:

“Meeting agendas”
This is how you turn on the feature. Without ticking this box, everything stays the same. But, once you have ticked it, you get a simple fixed agenda that HR Admin can set and is used for all employees.

“Separate standard agenda for managers”
Tick this box if instead of a single standard agenda you want to have different agendas for managers vs non-managers. Again, HR have control over what these two agendas are.

The standard agendas are edited in a new tab in HR’s Configuration area called “Agendas” – look for it in the main navigation bar once you have turned agendas on. We have created some default ones to get you going. These are applied as soon as you turn on the agenda feature.

“Managers can create team agendas”
Tick this box if you want to allow managers to manage their own agendas. Employees will initially be given a standard agenda as defined by HR (the settings above) but managers will also be able to create their own agendas and assign them to one or more of their direct reports. They will be able to do all of this in the One-to-Ones tab using the “Agendas” link in the sidebar (under the list of direct reports). They can drop back to the standard one at any time from here too, if they wish.

When an agenda has been set, then it will show as a coloured ‘card’ at the top of the meetings list on the One-to-Ones tab. Simple as that.

Should you use agendas?
We think so, even if you just turn on a single fixed agenda under HR’s control to give employees a little guidance on what to talk about in one-to-one meetings.

 

Other changes in this release

  • Employee roles are now ‘pinned’ to the appraisal/probation review rather to a review period. It means that a better history of changes are kept, particularly when roles change between a probation review and an appraisal
  • Several usability tweaks
  • Squished some pesky bugs
Rob Wheatley

Re-Plan for Success

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You plan it, you execute to the plan and you’re done. Simple. Only it’s not. You should never really finish a plan, but keep it open and constantly review it. Never lose sight of your high level goals. Keep your hand on the tiller and make constant small course corrections rather than getting stuck or lurching sideways. 

When you finally start a project and get going with your plan, things inevitably come up. More work items are required and some planned ones aren’t required anymore. The temptation is to slip changes into the original plan as you go, but too much of this and you’ll find yourself constantly churning in the weeds, hitting delays, butting up against avoidable obstacles and missing opportunities. Staying in the weeds is a really easy way to lose direction and add delays.

We find it a good practice to take time and take a step back and review plans at a high level. Check direction, re-prioritise, review the goals and ensure our course is correct. In fact, we do this every Monday morning to keep us straight for the week. Our experience is that low level management of work items as they come up starts you on a path of exponential growth of problems. Avoid it by taking a step back.

Keeping plans fresh like this will help you achieve your goals faster. This doesn’t have to be confined to project delivery as the same is true for personal development or any kind of objectives setting. Do you work in an organisation that sets annual employee objectives? If so, I’m sure that when you come to do your annual performance review many of the objectives are stale. Keep them fresh by increasing the review frequency, if you don’t, both you and your company are missing opportunities.

Rob Wheatley
Cogendo