I’ve been batting around the idea of starting up weekly one on one meetings with all my folks. As a front line manager my primary goal is to grow my people. Then of course if you slot out 30 minutes a week for 9 employees you get 4.5 hours per week. That seems like a lot at its face, but it’s really about 10% of my time. At the end of the day there some obvious benefits to meeting with your people semi-formally every week, especially the ones who don’t swing by your cube that often.
As an experiment I’ve been testing out a reverse one on one with my boss. I simply setup a weekly half hour meeting with him on every Friday for the last few weeks. It’s actually been going better than expected. I get some great feedback from all of his experience, and I can save up some more strategic questions for our weekly session. We haven’t held to the 30 minute schedule so far, because the discussion keeps spilling over.
Now I just have to schedule out the one on ones for my team starting next year.