The five workplace conversations critical to boosting employee engagement and performance

Today’s managers must navigate all kinds of topics with their employees, some of which might feel personal, or challenging at times. Yet 69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with their reports.

1:1 conversations can drive employee engagement and performance or prevent it. The difference between the two lies in how conversations are organised, prepared for, what they focus on, how they are guided in the moment, and the strength of the outcome achieved.

Enabling and empowering our managers to drive productive, high-quality 1:1 conversations could change everything. This week, we’re exploring the five workplace conversations we see as critical to boosting employee engagement and performance.?

1. Setting clear goals to success?

Stress is often a result of unclear expectations. If employees don’t understand the goals they are working towards, how can they feel motivated to achieve them? And how can managers take action to help employees achieve those objectives? Managers and employees can co-create achievable yet ambitious goals through productive conversations, and then use 1:1s to evaluate progress. Personal goals should be contextualised, showing how every individual contribution rolls up to organisational strategy.?

2. Development Conversations ?

A study by Gallup found that what employees most wanted from managers was clarity, feedback, opportunities to learn and grow, and accountability. However, the same study discovered that only 30% of employees strongly agreed that their manager involves them in goal setting. When 87% of millennials (and 69% of others) rate professional growth and development opportunities as important to their job, it's vital that these development conversations are taking place.?

3. Motivation?

A blanket approach to boost motivation across the business (happy hours, weekend retreats, perks, etc) will never have the same impact as consistent 1:1 conversations. Motivation is deeply personal and no two employees are the same: what might motivate one may not motivate another. So how do you find out? You ask. Managers need to be open to having conversations about what really motivates an employee, whether it’s a professional or personal driver.

4. Wellbeing?

The way we feel will always impact the way we work. We are multidimensional beings, and no amount of professionalism can prevent our wellbeing from influencing our day-to-day, whether we are happy, sad, stressed or having a crisis of confidence. Yet only 14% of employees feel able to talk about stress and mental health with their manager, meaning that wellbeing issues are often invisible to managers. To change this, managers need to be coached to prompt these critical conversations and be open and available to the responses.?

5. Reviews?

Reviews shouldn’t be intimidating or demoralising, yet for many employees, they often are. A year’s worth of feedback is distilled into one, short meeting, with little context and another year until the employee can find out whether they have fulfilled their objectives. It’s no wonder that 47% of millennials start looking for a new job after their annual performance review. How can managers change this? End of year reviews should be one part of an ongoing development conversation, just one of many 1:1s that focus on development, opportunities and learning. By building evaluation and actionable objectives into regular 1:1s, end of year reviews can become a positive, inspiring annual summary.?