At GitLab we have weekly 1-1s.
The aim of this page is to:
This page does not:
Guidelines:
You may choose to use the 1:1 Issue Generator for your 1:1s. See the project Readme for more details.
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:
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.
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)
Take a look at your team's Zendesk Explore dashboard and see if they are meeting the ticket baseline. Details about this on the Support Engineer responsibilities page.
It's likely you can skip this section if you're happy with the contributions people are making.
Discuss the career development and learning aspirations of the Support Engineer at least quarterly and provide guidance to help reach the goals.
Agree on and document a training plan that accommodates those aspirations and meets the needs of the support team in terms of enhancing team skills and filling knowledge gaps.
Agree on checkin points to review progress and, if necessary, to assist the Support Engineer in prioritizing and allocating the time required for Learning and Development.
Further details on Career Development Page
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.
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.
All 1:1 notes documents should include similar text and links at the top.
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).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