In practice, I use a KanBan board with my employees.
Trello, for example, is suitable for this, where you can create such a board for free. I'd also be happy to send you a template for this board, just write to me here on the homepage.
On this board I have the following columns:
Health check,
Employee topics,
My themes,
Goals & plans and
Tasks.
Each team member has their own board and chooses their own background.
If I have a new employee, I do a longer appointment as an introduction, which is similar to an annual employee interview, but without looking back. Otherwise, I check the board with each of my employees every 2 weeks. I have set a regular date for this. This appointment lasts 30 minutes, but can be extended if necessary. If everything is green and there is nothing else new, the appointment might not take longer than 5 minutes, but you have reassured yourself, show your employees that the board is important to you and you have briefly spoken to each other. All of this is incredibly motivating, especially when talking about positive things. So please take your time for this too.
Sometimes it happens that an employee thinks that the current work is more important than this conversation, because you can push your own concerns backwards ... Definitely NO! Please only postpone this appointment in urgent emergencies and do not cancel at all.
The team member should think about the board in advance and can happily fill it with topics that we then discuss in the conversation.
I like to join in with small talk before we go through the topics and the columns.
The first thing we do is take a look at the health check and see if there are any changes there.
Green label means that everything is in the green area: D
Yellow label - we should take a look at what we can do better there.
Red label- ok here we have to talk about the reasons and how we can solve that.
After the check and a review, we then turn to goals and plans.
We also check whether previous goals and plans have been met, are still current or are in the process of being done. After we have updated and discussed this, we formulate concrete tasks that we can assign to ourselves and sort them according to priority and dependencies.
By working with a board, you can always see the current state of affairs at a glance and you are at eye level. My employees really enjoy working with it, and we don't have to talk to our employees every year. Please make sure, however, that the employee and you yourself go into the conversation prepared. We are not mind readers. If possible, stick to the order and look at each point. The additional advantage of a 2-week review is that you can split up topics if you cannot discuss everything in one day.
Have retrospectives at team level.
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