Should Every Manager/Employee Meeting Be About Performance?

Almost every type of manager/employee meeting is a one-way street. We have many names for these meetings…project updates, status checks, performance reviews of course, and in call centers they are called monitoring meetings. That’s when employees sit with their managers monthly to listen to a recorded customer call to get scored and critiqued.

Some managers sprinkle niceties at the beginning or the end: “How ya doin’?” “What’s happenin’?” “Everything goin’ OK for you?” And those companies that still do performance reviews might include some form of mandatory career questions at the end.

Change the Direction

Only recently have the bravest leaders suggested that managers actually schedule these one-way meetings in the opposite direction where the employee talks about THEIR needs and managers listen. We call these meetings Stay Interviews. So imagine your reaction if tomorrow your manager said these words to you:

“I want to schedule a meeting with you, just to talk about every way I can
make working here better for you. How’s your calendar next Tuesday?”

Change the Conditioning

Forgive your employees if they give a strange look, or if they enter the meeting with reports in hand to prove their worth. That’s how we’ve conditioned them.

After years of helping organizations implement Stay Interviews, we at C-Suite Analytics understand why Stay Interviews bring magic. Yet it’s easy to forget most employees’ initial, emotional reaction to being asked to participate in one. Their reaction is of course clouded by how much that employee trusts her manager…the always-present T-word…so it is either “Yes! I’d love to have that meeting”, or “Uh, sure, we can meet…let’s see.”

Solid data tells us these three facts:

1. Voluntary employee turnover is skyrocketing
2. Employee engagement has been stuck for 17 years
3. The number one reason why employees stay and engage…or disengage and then leave…is how much they trust their boss.

Keep the Employee Longer

Can managers build trust by making every meeting about performance? Yes, some can. But the more impactful way to build trust in the manager/employee relationship is by including one-way meetings based on each employee’s individual needs. And Stay Interviews are the solution.