We continue the series of articles dedicated to one-to-one meetings, with a topic that emphasizes the importance of these individual meetings, explicitly showing their benefits for employees, managers and company.

Although one-to-one meetings can sometimes be perceived as time consuming, the return on investment in this form of meeting is huge. For the employees, the advantages are obvious, because they are in the center of attention and their well-being at work is the main objective of such discussions. It remains to be seen what the benefits would be for managers and for the organization as a whole.

It is said that employees leave managers, not companies. With a good manager, work becomes more enjoyable, and employee engagement and productivity increase. Gallup has shown through an empirical study that employee engagement and regular one-to-one meetings are directly connected. One of the findings of this study shows that employees who benefit from regular one-to-one meetings with their managers are three times more engaged in their job. Therefore, one-to-one meetings are one of the most important tools for successful managers.

A first benefit is that one-to-one meetings help managers keep their teams. Through very specific individual approaches, tailored to each subordinate, they can quickly fix the problems caused by low morale, which are one of the causes of losing people and breaking up teams.

A second benefit for managers is that individual meetings with employees are a true opportunity to develop coaching and leadership skills, which are increasingly sought after. By becoming better “coaches,” by actively listening to each member of the team, managers can better support employee performance.

This leads to the third benefit of one-to-one meetings for managers: through regular and personalized conversations, they build a trusting relationship with employees, which solidifies teams and creates a safe environment for people, indispensable conditions for performance.

Finally, one-to-one meetings can help reconnect daily tasks with the organization’s purpose and mission. Loaded with tasks, employees may lose their sense of common purpose, feel disconnected from the company’s mission, no longer clearly perceive the connection between their work at the micro level and the macro purpose of the organization. Individual meetings re-establish these connections and highlight each other’s contributions to overall performance.

First of all, in the current context of the transition to remote work, one-to-one meetings are an essential way to fill communication gaps with employees who work remotely and provide them with everything they need to perform.

In terms of internal promotion – an ideal of any organization and an encouraging sign of a healthy culture that rewards employee loyalty and hard work – it must be said that one-to-one meetings play a key role. Senior leaders need to invest in coaching rising leaders, and this can be best done individually, through face-to-face meetings.

One-to-one meetings also proved to be more effective, sometimes they are the key to organizational performance, when large companies such as Deloitte and Adobe began replacing long performance reporting meetings with short but customized individual meetings.

A huge benefit for companies is the consistent and real-time flow of feedback in both directions (bottom-up and top-down). Or, this is best done in one-to-one meetings.

One-to-one meetings are one of the most powerful tools managers have. They can improve employee engagement, a major organizational process, vital to the performance of any organization. Through one-to-one meetings, companies can make it easier to move from a rigid organizational culture to a social and agile one.

Co-Factor facilitates the operationalization of this process, through its innovative digital platform, which, through its functionalities, encourages constant feedback, available in the Internal Communication Module, but, especially, in the Performance Management Module, where constant feedback sessions can be activated within individual performance plans.

The Co-Factor platform is a real boost ramp for increasing employee engagement, through which managers act as essential motivational levers. It allows anyone to schedule one-to-one meetings and launch, at any time, engagement initiatives, which create positive energy.

With the software developed by Co-Factor, the degree of employee engagement can be increased and measured, one-to-one feedback can be encouraged and monitored, a specific strategy can be created to support employees to perform, organizational culture can be promoted and employee results can be measured, thus obtaining a clear picture of employee spirit, engagement and performance.