5 Ideas for a Productive 1:1 Meeting full of Energy

Are your 1-on-1 meetings with your direct reports energizing – or a chore? I suspect it tends towards the latter. But why?

Well, you know that feeling when you listen to the same playlist over and over again? It’s fun at first, but eventually it gets boring. One-on-one meetings between managers and employees work the same way: they need fresh ideas, new questions and a surprising element every now and then to be truly inspiring.

After all, who wants to eat only vanilla ice cream every week? It’s a good idea of yours to try out new ideas and topics in your one-on-one meeting.

Imagine you have a greenhouse full of plants, but you only ever water the same three. At some point, other plants or topics that are actually very important will wither away. (Okay, sorry, that was my last metaphor.)

Whether in a face-to-face, digital or virtual one-on-one meeting, 1-to-1 meetings between bosses and employees offer space for feedback and thus for personal development, which is essential in today’s working world. And in this article, I’ll give you some good ideas that you can use in your weekly, bi-weekly or monthly one-on-one meetings to have good conversations.

First of all: If you’re still unsure about what good one-on-one meetings look like, take a look at our guide: The guide with 6 tips for successful one-on-one meetings.

Before I get to the actual ideas, I would first like to give you a few typical topics that should be discussed regularly in your one-on-one meetings. After all, I don’t know how broad your range of methods and templates already is.

5 typical topics for one-on-one conversations:

1. Goals & progress: What milestones have been achieved and where are there still challenges?
2. Feedback: What is going well and where is there potential for improvement – in both directions?
3. Resources & blockers: What obstacles stand in the way and what support is needed?
4. Personal development: What skills would the employee like to develop and how can the manager help?
5. Motivation & satisfaction: How does your staff currently feel and what could increase their motivation?

5 atypical but important topics:

1. Energy level & workload: When does the employee feel overwhelmed or underchallenged, and how can this be adjusted?
2. Desire for more or less responsibility: Are there areas of responsibility in which the employee would like to grow or reduce their workload?
3. Hidden talents: What skills or interests does your staff have that are not yet being utilized?
4. Communication style: How does the employee prefer feedback and exchange – directly, in writing, reflectively or spontaneously?
5. Time thieves & efficiency: Which meetings, tools or processes take up unnecessary time and should be optimized?

Why do I give you so many topics to discuss? 

Of course, so that you know which fields you should systematically cover in your one-on-one conversation. I’ll provide you with specific templates and questions later on. But let’s start with a very general template first.

The fact that you clicked on this article as a supervisor tells me that you are looking for ideas and topics for one-on-one meetings.

That’s why you’ll first find a standard doc template here, which should be a good accompaniment to a classic monthly appraisal interview, for example.

By the way, you can save the template as a Doc under the actual template, but alternatively also as a PDF, Google Sheets, Excel or Word document. Just click on the “Plus” toggle.

Now let’s move on to an idea or topic that takes a more creative approach to the one-on-one conversation.

A central prerequisite for successful teams is so-called psychological safety. And to improve this, a healthy culture of error is very important. The following idea helps you, as a supervisor, to reflect on the topic of “making mistakes” with your employee, using an image. The best thing to do, of course, is to combine the image with the questions.

As you can see, you can also use this template interactively in the 1:1 meeting software Echometer.

The following topic or idea is probably particularly interesting for introverted employees.

The procedure is relatively simple: With the help of the graphic, you can underline what the distribution of speech looks like in healthy, successful teams. Then, as the boss, you reflect together with your employee on the role he or she plays in this.

Sometimes it is difficult for us to come up with ideas on how we can develop ourselves. This idea can help with your one-on-one meeting.

The so-called “model learning” is one of the most original types of learning of Homo Sapiens: You look at the behavior of your direct conspecifics. And, at best, you do this from the most competent conspecifics possible. The following exercise tries to create exactly this effect by reflecting on the comparison group of your employee. Perhaps a talented employee should dare to join another team or another project?

The following topic or idea is not suitable for every one-on-one conversation. But it can be all the more powerful at the right moment: Namely, when you are in the middle of or shortly after a conflict.

The idea here is that you reflect on the conflict behavior of your direct report, based on the conflict schema shown visually below. In my experience, this schema in particular makes it easier to talk about the topic constructively.

In addition to the ideas and topics above, there are of course other aspects that you can reflect on in your appraisal interview.

Having spoken to around 100 managers over the last few months, I have noticed a pattern.

Many supervisors integrate small surveys into their one-on-one meetings on an ad hoc basis. This means they simply go through a few questions in a relaxed manner, asking the employee a) for their agreement with a statement (for example, from 1 to 7) and then b) why they answered that way.

They expect the following from these micro-surveys in 1:1s:

• • • More variety and engagement in the 1-on-1 conversation **
• • • Adopting new perspectives **
• • • Measurability of (soft) KPIs such as satisfaction over time **

And of course, you can also use this idea for your one-on-one meeting. I have compiled five statements here that focus on reflecting important prerequisites for every successful employee.

You can also download this template as a Doc, but what’s even better is this: In our one-on-one meeting software, we have an integrated tool that visualizes the results over time as a metric and gives you tips with an AI assistant - feel free to take a look without logging in via the button below.

As you can see, the statements address central aspects of a satisfied employee. Another prerequisite for healthy, productive employees is, of course, a good manager. Yes, I’m talking about you here. And of course, there are also statements for this that you can take as an idea into your one-on-one meeting. Specifically, here are 4 behavioral anchors that you could reflect on in a monthly or quarterly one-on-one meeting with your employee.

And, can you hardly wait to ask these questions in your one - on - one meeting? Very good, I’m glad to hear that. If you want even more creative input and ideas, I can recommend our corresponding article: 129 Brilliant One-on-One Meeting Questions (from the Psychologist) .

You probably already guessed it. Of course, there are many more ideas for one - on - one meetings that you can use sooner or later. For example, I’m talking about templates for your one - on - one meeting on the topic of salary, your conversation with a difficult employee, or with a completely new employee.

We have additional templates for all of these use cases, which you can find in this article: 1:1 Meetings: 15 Proven Templates to Edit (Free)

One - on - one meetings should never be boring - then something is wrong. At the same time, you shouldn’t artificially drag them out. But if you have a good plan and good ideas for your one - on - one meetings, then it should never come to that.

But you must not forget one piece of wisdom: there are countless ideas that you can try out - but the most important thing is that you tailor the conversation individually to your employee. Our AI Meeeting Assistant for one - on - one meetings can help you with this, by the way. If you would like to learn more about it, take a look at our website: The best 1-on-1 meeting software .