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1-on-1 Meeting Assistant — Have the best 1-on-1 meetings with your team.
The 1-on-1 Meeting Assistant provides a simple and effective way to improve your 1-on-1 meetings with recommended questions, simplified scheduling, and automated reminders.
Managers continue to learn new insights about their employees, and employees have a pressure-free way to speak openly about how they’re doing.
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Replies
Jeff Nolan
I really like purpose-specific products like this, but have to admit that integrating purpose-specific products into my team workflow is a real challenge. Yet-another-SaaS-app syndrome. Companies like to say it’s a low friction exercise but that just isn’t true, everything you do in a team has a price to pay in the form of time expended managing change.
The Slack integration that is available for the product is welcome, but I want it to go beyond reminders in Slack to ‘go to your dashboard”. This is actually relevant for me becuase I use Slack for my 1:1 meetings. I have 34 people on my team, 7 direct reports that I do weekly 1:1s with. I have a private 1:1 channel in slack for each direct report and through the week we drop discussion items and questions into the channel, which then becomes the agenda for my 1:1 call/meeting. A leadhonestly bot that hosts the Q&A inside a private Slack channel, and then provides a query interface for stats would mean I could use your app entirely through Slack.
The questions I reviewed in the product marketing material were interesting, but I have to question the utility of asking open-ended questions. I prefer specific and contextual questions over “what keeps you engaged?”. The reason is simple, open-ended questions produce open-ended answers. “What is the last professional development activity you did for yourself?” will provide a more interesting answer than “what are your professional development goals?”. Another example is “what is your largest frustration?”; a question that is looking for a scratch to whatever itch is most recent. Take a specific example of friction you, as a manager, observed and talk about that specific example.
How do you curate and test the questions you are providing through the app?
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@jeffnolan Thank you so much for the thoughtful response. You make some great points and have great questions, which I'll do my best to respond to.
There certainly is a cost to any change, particularly when that change is around process and people. We're continually evaluating ways to reduce this friction and cost when implementing Lead Honestly. We're far from perfect but the long term value we've been able to create far outweighs the cost of the initial change.
Lead Honestly for Slack today is our first foray into developing a more robust integration. We're currently working with our customers who've taken advantage of this integration to learn how they would like to see it grow over time. Your feedback is closely aligned to what we're hearing and will be delving into before long.
With the questions, you're right on the money. Specific and contextual questions yield far better answers than the more generic questions. For every question we use we're considering the response it may elicit, and how that question may be rewritten or changed to gain a deeper, more valuable response. During this process the questions are reviewed by a handful of people from varying backgrounds, including managers, psychologist, career counselors, and more. Even better, with tools such as machine learning, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and the alike we're able to continually learn which questions work best and how all of the questions can routinely be rewritten and improved.
If you'd like to learn more or jump in deeper please let me know. I'd be happy to connect and would love any additional feedback you're willing to share.
Thanks again Jeff!
I use Lead Honestly at Threadless and I love it. It's a tool I have come to rely on when communicating with my team and truly understanding their needs.
One of the most challenging parts of 1:1s is they can often be unstructured with no real goal, for either a manager or an individual contributor. I love that Lead Honestly tracks conversations over time.
My only gripe is that the automated messages may feel less personal; 1:1 meetings are meant to be extremely personal, and having an email come from "Lead Honestly" feels less genuine than a manager asking questions in a personal email.. As a result, the questions + prompts themselves can yield more generic answers.
@jackbwheeler thank you for the feedback Jack, and we're big fans of having historical context to conversations too.
To be honest, we feared having the questions sent from Lead Honestly wouldn't feel as personal as well. What we've found is, how a manager follows up on and responds an employee's answers matters far more than where the questions come from or where the discussion originates.
Our goal is to build compassion and strengthen the relationships between managers and employees, with the questions and prompts only being an entry point.
guys, how this is working at PH? You were just features few hours ago, but you have comments already 2 days old? I am just curious
@dainiskanopa Hi Dainis, I can't speak for PH, however I believe posts may be featured at anytime.
Hello, I’m Shay from Lead Honestly!
The past few months we’ve been working on expanding the product at Lead Honestly and we couldn’t be more excited to share the 1-on-1 Meeting Assistant today!
We designed and built the 1-on-1 Meeting Assistant based on how we’ve lead and managed our own teams for years. The way it works is simple enough: add your employees and we’ll send them curated questions, collect their responses, and get the conversation started for your next 1-on-1 meeting.
As a manager you’ll continue to learn new insights about your employees without interruption as the questions are new each meeting and the workflows are all automated. As an employee you'll the ability to easily share thoughts and feelings with your manager that you may not have felt comfortable doing before without the prompt of a question.
In all, we’re pretty excited about the product!
Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment, we’d love to hear from you.
Shay
@shayhowe congrats to you & Darby! What are some of the product expansions you've made in these past few months? What's on deck for the next 3-6? Keep up the great work!
@mikegelphman Thank you!
The past few months we've expanded from simply providing questions to managers for their 1-on-1 meetings to providing an entire automated 1-on-1 meeting workflow that sends employees curated questions, collects their responses, and notifies managers when an employee is ready to meet.
Additionally, we've added Pulse Questions, which provide a quick and easy way to survey employees in real-time, and a Slack integration, to work with you and your team where you already work, inside Slack.
Ahead we're working on team accounts, action items/note taking, richer intelligence, and iterating on feedback, amongst a few other projects.
It's been exciting and we're looking forward to the continued progress!
@shayhowe - always appreciate frameworks/tools to help improve 1:1s! Seems like there's some overlap with 15Five (or maybe I'm imagining things?)
How does Lead Honestly differentiate itself from them and others in this space?
@jenlwei Thanks!
We do slightly overlap with other products, no doubt. Our core difference is ensuring that employees and their managers are able to build strong, engaging relationships. We do that by anchoring on 1-on-1 meetings, providing discussion topics to kick start the conversation and workflows to keep the conversations going. With this, we've seen incredible engagement that increases over time as companies use Lead Honestly.
We're also a fraction of the price of others at $9 a month a manager with no limit or additional cost per employee. 😃
@shayhowe @darbyfrey1 Thanks for building a rock-solid product. Our managers have been diving into meaningful and insightful conversations that have produced a ton of unexpected benefits. This is a game changer. People always talk about wanting an amazing culture, but rarely do they put the effort into having the hard & deep conversations to get there. Congrats. And - seriously - thanks.
Thank *you* @wclittle! You've been a fantastic customer and supporter. @darbyfrey1 and I are very appreciative of the feedback from you and your team, helping make this product better everyday!
I've had the pleasure of watching Shay and Darby build Lead Honestly firsthand and am happy to see them release the latest iteration with their 1-on-1 Meeting Assistant. These are proven leaders and the product works!
@tom_pryor Thank you so much for the feedback Tom, we really appreciate it!
We're currently exploring better ways to present the questions to you, be it showing you all the questions planned for the upcoming months or weeks, allowing you to customize these questions far in advance, as well as providing the list of historical questions too. We can certainly show a preview of the email too.
Sending the email from your address is interesting, and something we've gotten mixed feedback on. It's worth additional research!
If you feel you lack personal communication with your team this is something worth a shot.
I really like that this app has a built-in question templates suggesting you how you proceed with the one-on-one meetings with your employees.
Might be really helpful if looking for ways to boost motivation in your team.
A really useful app if looking for ways to boost motivation and personal communication within your team.
Pros:question suggestions, easy team adding
Cons:quite expensive for a basic functionality it offers
One of the exciting parts of the 1-on-1 Meeting Assistant for me is the integration with Slack. Many teams spend their day in Slack, so having Lead Honestly available right there makes it very easy to create new interactions between managers and employees, and increase engagement.
This is a relatively new feature for us, but we've seen very encouraging feedback and we will be expanding the capabilities significantly in the coming months.
We've been using LeadHonestly for the better part of this year after moving from another service. We're a small tight-knit team of 10-ish people. That familiarity led to assumptions and the same two people getting together are going to quickly run out of new ideas of things to talk about.
LeadHonestly provides us the opportunity to explore those unspoken assumptions and makes for better relationships all around.
Pros:Thoughtful questions that produce insightful conversation in our 1-on-1s. This is worth the price of admission for myself and my team.
Cons:Nothing yet.
My manager utilized this tool for over a dozen of our 1x1's, each of which have led to juicy discussions with no time wasted. Our 30 min 1x1's have all been straight to the point to really get the core of where I'm at in my role. Answering LeadHonestly's questions has been a very effective method to vocalize my thoughts to my manager and as a result strengthened our relationship.
Pros:Fantastic questions that enabled a deeper relationship with my manager.
Cons:None yet.
I've used Lead Honestly to drive 1:1 meetings with my team for several months. The questions enable me to have rich conversations with my direct reports, harvesting employee engagement and development. By using Lead Honestly I have been able to identify areas of improvement for the business, and guide my team members to success.
Pros:Thought-provoking questions curated for 1:1 meetings with your direct reports. Saves time and drives meaningful conversation.
Cons:None
