Must-ask questions for one-on-one meetings

People Management, Practical, Basic · 01 Feb 2021

1:1s can be one of the most enjoyable parts of people management. It’s the place you can get real with your team members and build the base of your relationship.

The tone of the meetings will have a significant impact on the work you do. If you are having trouble finding the right questions to engage with your team, try some of these great questions to ask in one-on-one meetings.

Discover issues early on

While things are calm, it’s good to keep asking the hard questions. Those are the ones that will help you catch the issues when they are still manageable, instead of after they explode.

Typical questions to discover issues can be:

What was the most boring task you did last week?
Did you leave work feeling frustrated during the past week?
Have you been thinking about work outside the office hours? What about?
When was the last time you felt excited about a task or project?
How do you feel about your salary?
Do you fantasize about leaving the company? What’s that fantasy like?

Also, if you know your reportee has raised issues in the past, address them. Ask your reportee if they are fully solved, how is everything progressing and try to understand if the solutions were temporary and the issues will emerge again.

Grow your relationship

Every 1:1 meeting is an opportunity to become closer to your reportees. Understand what bothers them and how you are contributing to their workplace happiness.

Here are some questions you might find useful to spark a relationship-growing conversations:

Do you have any feedback for me?
Did I do something last week that made your work harder?
What would you have done differently if you were on my shoes?
How do you feel about decision X? Do you agree with me? Why?
Have your personal or professional goals changed in any way? How?

Gauge enthusiasm on current role

Maybe things are not bad, but there might still be room for improvement. Having a grasp of your team’s enthusiasm is key to plan ahead and understand their future potential.

Some insightful questions are:

How do you feel about the work you did last week?
What are you most proud about from last week?
What could we have changed in order to make last week’s work more rewarding?
What did you learn last week?
What new things have you tried last week?

Others

One very interesting prompt is to ask them to rate their job from 1 to 10 (1 being a bad job and 10 being awesome). Whatever they say, ask them what would a “one point higher” look like (ie. if they say 6 ask what would a 7 look like). This can give you extremely important information that is otherwise hard to obtain.

And there are plenty other useful 1:1 questions to try out. Just be sure to expand on whatever the answer is and you’ll definitely end up with some interesting new knowledge about your reportees.