Prescribe exactly how a 1:1 should be conducted - these are guidelines
Include guidance on how to discuss career development, performance reviews and personal issues. Please leave time in 1:1s for these other important areas.
Guidelines:
You should be able to cover the key components outlined on this page in 10 to 15 minutes.
Leave time for general conversation and other important areas like career development.
Some weeks you may focus entirely on another area (e.g. personal issues, or a project you're working on)
Sometimes you may wish to schedule a longer or additional call to focus on an important area
1:1 Issue Generator Project
You may choose to use the 1:1 Issue Generator for your 1:1s. See the project Readme for more details.
Call structure
0. Pre-call
Select ticket(s) for review (see below)
Review activity links (see below)
1. Starting the call
Most people like to start the call with five minutes of general conversation.
We recommend avoiding small talk openers like 'How are you doing?'. Instead, set the context and get precise, actionable information. Some examples:
Use a five point scale and ask 'On a scale of one to five, how are you feeling this week?' (see below for sample text).
Ask for two ratings on a 0-10 scale, one for "stress" and one for "happiness."
Pay attention to trends over time.
Questions like these help open the conversation and put the work-related aspects in context. (Credit for the idea from this GitLab conversation.)
Give the Support Engineer the opportunity to raise anything important they would like to discuss near the beginning of the call. You might want to skip the sections below if there are more important things to focus on.
2. How was ticket work this week?
The core focus of a Support Engineers' work is helping customers by resolving support tickets, so it's important to spend some time each week discussing this work.
A. Ticket Review
Each week you should review two tickets together during the 1:1 call. This can be done in 5 to 10 minutes. It's not an in-depth review. Details on how to do this are in the Working on Tickets page. We recommend that the manager reads some tickets before the call so that you are ready with concise feedback. The Comments Review tab on your personal Zendesk Explore dashboard is a good place to locate relevant tickets. The table on the left shows tickets that your reports have made more than one comment on in the last week. This makes it easy to find tickets they have been primarily focused on.
B. Public replies on assigned tickets (optional discussion)
Take a look at your team's Zendesk Explore dashboard and see how they're doing with the goal of around 50-60% of public replies on tickets that are assigned to themselves. Details about this on the Working on Tickets page.
It's likely you can skip this section if people are successfully balancing their contributions.
C. Meeting the ticket baseline (optional discussion)
It's likely you can skip this section if you're happy with the contributions people are making.
3. Discuss other activities from responsibility areas
Discuss interesting activities from the activity links at the top of the document (see below for examples).
There may be activities that the Support Engineer would like to discuss that aren't included in the activity links.
4. Other discussions
Everyone has different things they like to focus on in 1:1s. The rest of the call should focus on things the Support Engineer and manager would like to discuss.
Text and links for the 'header' of 1:1 notes documents
All 1:1 notes documents should include similar text and links at the top.
1. How are you feeling this week on a scale of 1 to 5?
Very positive
More positive than usual
Same as usual
Not as good as usual
Not great right now
2. Activity Links
Assigned tickets: https://gitlab.zendesk.com/agent/users/{USER_ID}/assigned_tickets Replace {USER_ID} with the engineer's ZenDesk userid (shown in the address bar when viewing their profile).
All tickets commented on: https://gitlab.zendesk.com/agent/search/1?q=commenter%3A{USER_ID}%20order_by%3Aupdated_at%20sort%3Adesc Replace {USER_ID} with the engineer's ZenDesk userid
