Brace yourselves, employee check-ins are coming…
We’ve all seen the various memes when it comes to employee reviews. So what’s the big deal about having employee reviews anyway? Why does everyone hate them? Everyone is happy, right? Short answer, no. Long answer, if your company has low turnover and high participation with events, then yes, everyone is probably generally happy. But is that really good enough to retain your top talent and great employees? That’s where employee check-ins come into play.
Check-ins vs reviews
Bear in mind, employee check-ins are not the same as reviews. Reviews are usually done annually to go over the employee’s entire year and possibly discuss salary increases or the like. Check-ins are just that. It is a supervisor or manager actually checking in with someone to see how things are going. Check-ins, unlike reviews, are not meant to be a one-hour session of going over everything under the sun that’s happened for the last month. It’s just what it says – it checks in.
Cadence is key
The first step, schedule them out and then keep scheduling. Get a cadence you can work with and then stick to it. Scheduling a check-in every two weeks only to let it fall by the wayside after two months because you can’t keep up doesn’t accomplish much. In fact, it shows that management doesn’t follow through and insinuates that you don’t care about your staff. Pick your timing and stick with it. Once you get a process and routine going, you can get these done in 15-20 minutes.
5 Questions To Ask in Employee Check-ins
Some of the things we recommend for a check-in:
1.| How is the team member is doing?
2.| Ask about the hobbies they have going on. If you don’t know, start the conversation.
3.| How are things are going at work?
4.| Any new processes we have put into place that you like or that don’t seem to work?
5.| KPIs and Metrics?
We intentionally leave KPIs/metrics for the last part of our check-in. The numbers are important, but they are not more important than the people. Yes, everyone has some KPIs or metrics that they need to perform to for their role, but it’s not the be-all-end-all.
3 Key Takeaways
1.| Get the conversation going, ask for input, and really LISTEN to what the person is saying. If they are taking the time to give positive or negative feedback, take the time to listen.
2.| Especially during the recent pandemic, make everyone is actually ok emotionally and mentally. If your team members aren’t in a good place, they won’t be able to be in a good place at work and thusbe a productive member of the team.
3.| When we have happy employees, all the other pieces fall into place: metrics improve, customer satisfaction improves, internal employee satisfaction improves.
Just imagine, we can make all this happen simply by having thoughtful conversations with your team members every month. If you’d like to talk more about employee check-ins, how to improve processes or how we can help overall with business improvement, check us out here and sign up for a free consultation.
