15Five’s Guide To Having Effective 1-On-1 Meetings With Remote Employees

Remote work is here to stay, and so are its challenges. Remote employees can easily feel disconnected and disengaged due to feelings of isolation and a lack of informal social contact with the rest of their teams. Without clear, structured communication, they also miss out on important context, making them less effective in their role.

That’s what makes 1-on-1 meetings uniquely important for remote employees. It keeps them aligned with their managers, prioritizes their growth, and reinforces the bond that keeps everyone driving towards broader organizational goals.

Tools like 15Five’s 1-on-1 feature help streamline and systematize your 1-on-1s, making them more consistently effective.

Here’s your full guide to remote 1-on-1s.

Key takeaways:

• Effective 1-on-1 meetings are crucial for remote employee engagement.
• How to structure productive 1-on-1 meetings that go beyond status updates.
• The role of manager enablement tools in improving remote communication.
• How 15Five supports engaging and meaningful 1-on-1 conversations.
• Strategies for building trust and accountability with remote team members.
• How to improve communication with remote workers through effective 1-on-1s.

Why effective 1-on-1 meetings matter for remote teams

If you think remote employees don’t need 1-on-1 meetings as much as the people you see in the office every day, you’d be wrong.

Keeping remote employees engaged comes with unique challenges that would be simpler to address if your workforce was in the office full-time. Some of these challenges include:

• A sense of isolation: In the office, opportunities abound for casual social contact and collaboration. When more of your employees work remotely, these opportunities decrease or cease to exist. It can make everyone feel disconnected from the rest of their team.
• Lack of visibility: Managers can more easily see what their direct reports are working on when everyone’s working in the same place. With remote work, it’s much harder to check in on someone’s work.
• Communication gaps: In the office, communicating with someone is as simple as stopping at their desk for a quick chat. While remote teams have no shortage of communication channels to choose from, including chat apps and email, that amount of choice can be its own problem. Important updates get trapped in specific communication channels, messages fall through the cracks, and everyone ends up feeling more disconnected.
• Proximity bias: Managers tend to prefer direct reports closer to them physically, whether that’s for handing out assignments or promotions. This can lead to remote workers growing frustrated and disengaged.

Regular 1-on-1 meetings can help managers tackle all these challenges. They give remote employees much-needed social contact. They give managers a better sense of what their direct reports are working on and where they need help. They centralize communication, shoring up the weaknesses of other communication channels and giving the whole team a foundation to build on. Finally, they can help combat proximity bias by giving managers more time with remote employees.

Additionally, 1-on-1 meetings are key to building trust, connection, and accountability. Because trust is so crucial for successful remote work, regular 1-on-1s are essential.

Employee engagement software can help you identify engagement problems and use 1-on-1s to fix them. See how 15Five makes that possible.

Key components of productive 1-on-1 meetings

A successful 1-on-1 requires an investment and commitment from both managers and direct reports. It’s not as simple as showing up in a virtual meeting room and chatting for half an hour. You need to show up with a plan, that plan needs to be connected to broader objectives, and both parties need to practice their active listening skills.

Here are essential elements for making every 1-on-1 more productive.

Goal setting

1-on-1 meetings are the perfect vehicle for both setting goals and checking in on progress. These goals should be one of the core things you cover in every 1-on-1. That way, any conversations happening in these meetings can be had in the context of an employee’s overall objectives—instead of a vacuum.

Active listening

The more your 1-on-1 meeting feels like you’re going through a checklist, the less effective it will be. A manager needs to listen attentively to what an employee has to say during a 1-on-1, even if it doesn’t fit neatly within their agenda. Regularly ask questions and check in to make sure you understand what’s being said.

A focus on coaching

1-on-1 meetings aren’t a manager’s opportunity to criticize everything their direct report is doing wrong or dispatch tasks. A better approach? Taking in what their direct report is saying and focusing on ways they can guide that person towards a path that leads them towards their goals.

Personal check-ins

Progress on goals and important projects isn’t the only thing that should be discussed in a 1-on-1. Managers should show empathy and check in on a direct report’s personal life, usually at the beginning of the call.

Meeting agendas or templates

Go into every 1-on-1 meeting with a plan. Better yet, make sure every 1-on-1 is consistent with a templated agenda or checklist. That way, direct reports know what to expect going into every meeting, and managers can trust they they’re giving everyone on their team a similar 1-on-1 experience.

Common challenges in remote 1-on-1s and how to overcome them

1-on-1 meetings come with important challenges, though some are unique to remote meetings. Here are some of the challenges you’re likely to run into when running 1-on-1s with remote employees.

Time zone coordination

Remote work gives you access to a massive, worldwide talent pool. But it also makes coordinating work—and 1-on-1 meetings—more of a challenge. When managers on the East Coast of the United States have to meet with direct reports working from Thailand, 1-on-1 meetings start to become less and less common.

In many situations, this can be resolved by adopting standardized hours for which people need to be available for meetings. This might stretch work days for some, but if 1-on-1s are important for you, this is a cost you’ll have to pay.

Alternatively, you can use asynchronous messaging or performance management tools to handle your 1-on-1s. That way, all the information everyone needs is kept in one place without anyone needing to stay after their regular workday.

Lack of informal context

In-office teams have multiple opportunities to meet, collaborate, and communicate informally. Remote workers don’t have access to any of these. That means they miss out on any important context shared around the water cooler or impromptu announcements from the CEO. Likewise, a manager might be missing some significant context on a direct report’s work when they’re remote.

The best way to resolve this is to prioritize asynchronous communication when your team has a significant number of remote workers. This means these employees can check in on important context through a chat app or email, making them better prepared for their 1-on-1.

Missing non-verbal cues

An important portion of communication is non-verbal. 1-on-1 meetings held in person allow managers and their direct reports to meet up in the same room and pick up on all non-verbal cues. This helps avoid misunderstandings and miscommunication. Remote 1-on-1s don’t have that luxury, even when they’re held through video conferencing.

You can mitigate this problem by being more intentional about your verbal communication. Be abundantly clear in everything you say, mind every word, and pay extra attention to what the other party has to say. Even if you can catch some non-verbal cues on a video call, you’re likely to miss some important ones.

Distractions

Remote work comes with a share of distractions, from packages being delivered to children crying in the background. At best, these distractions can make 1-on-1 meetings a bit more difficult. At worst, they can completely derail important conversations.

It’s impossible to avoid all distractions. Both managers and direct reports need to show some understanding and compassion if a distraction temporarily interrupts their 1-on-1. Similarly, both should also take precautions to avoid these distractions, like having meetings in a room with a closed door.

Technology issues

Remote 1-on-1s rely on technology in a way that in-person 1-on-1s don’t need to. That means anything from a Bluetooth headset failing to connect to an important tool being completely down can derail 1-on-1s for remote employees.

Not all technological issues can be avoided, but many can be mitigated by testing tools and equipment before a 1-on-1 meeting.

How 15Five’s manager enablement tools help structure effective 1-on-1s

A 1-on-1 meeting can be as simple as sitting in a meeting room with a printout of a template. But not only can this minimalistic approach be artificially limiting, but it’s also completely incompatible with remote work. That’s why managers need a dedicated platform for 1-on-1 meetings.

15Five is a performance management platform that streamlines, optimizes, and automates just about every aspect of driving employee engagement, tracking performance, and upskilling your workforce. It’s also an essential tool for structuring your remote 1-on-1s. 15Five can make your 1-on-1s stronger with:

• Dynamic, shared agendas that guide your conversations.
• Integrated tracking of goals, wins, challenges, and action items.
• Visibility into team member sentiment over time.
• Automatic reminders and scheduling.

Combined, these features give managers all the context they need for every 1-on-1 meeting. They give you a plan you can standardize across meetings, and they turn your 1-on-1s into data that the organization as a whole can use to improve.

Want to see how this can impact your teams? See a demo here.

How to improve communication with remote workers through 1-on-1s

Communication is key to the relationship between managers and their direct reports. But that communication is more challenging with remote workers. That’s why both these workers and managers have to be intentional about improving the way they communicate.

That starts with psychological safety. In a team where psychological safety is a priority, everyone feels comfortable enough to bring their full, true self to work. This leads to more open, honest conversations, in which managers and their team can really solve important problems.

As part of this, organizations need to implement feedback loops, which habituate teams in surfacing important feedback, whether it’s about other team members, their managers, or leadership. With a culture of continuous feedback at every level, you’ll foster communication throughout the team and allow remote workers to help surface and address issues as they come up.

These broader cultural elements can help improve your 1-on-1s, but the following elements are essential to the 1-on-1 meetings themselves:

• Ask meaningful questions: It’s all too easy to ask questions that seem to do little more than fill up time. If that’s the case with your 1-on-1s, don’t hesitate to make them shorter. Managers should ask meaningful questions when meeting with reports, focusing on roadblocks, progress, and wellness.
• Encourage employees to come prepared: Managers aren’t the only ones who should prepare ahead of a 1-on-1. Ensure employees also take the time to prepare questions and progress reports ahead of time.
• Follow up with written summaries and action steps: The things you discuss in your 1-on-1s shouldn’t end there. AI tools can help turn your meetings into written summaries for future consultation, and both parties should come away with clear next steps.

Close the remote gap

Regular 1-on-1 meetings are essential for everyone, but they’re especially important for remote workers, who can easily feel disconnected and isolated from the rest of their team. These meetings can help improve employee engagement and build clear paths for their development. When managers use the right tools and proven strategies, they can make each 1-on-1 even more effective, and that effectiveness has a lasting impact on their team.

Want to see how the right tool can completely transform your 1-on-1s? Get a demo of 15Five here.