Everyone is over-scheduled. Adding another meeting to your growing calendar is hard for any employee. Two leaders at AHF are showing us how to make the most of those one on one meetings with our employees to leave everyone feeling valued, connected, and understood.
Making the Most of Your 1:1 Time
Two Leaders at AHF share their powerful perspectives.
GUEST BIOS:
Mary Cadahia is the Director of Human Resources for the southern bureau of the Aids Healthcare Foundation. She is responsible for supporting business leaders and managers as they navigate the world of HR, from employee relations to payroll.
Janette Alvarez is the Northern Regional Director for Healthcare Operations. She supports AHF healthcare centers in her region with all administration & operations— including supporting everyone from the front desk to the doctors with any administrative needs they may have.
CORE TOPICS + DETAILS:
[2:48] - Managers & Staff: A Give & Take
The importance of two-way communication
What’s on the minds of your employees? The best way to find out is to ask. If there’s a topic that’s top of mind for either you or your team members, simply have a frank discussion with them. They’ll feel valued, they’ll feel heard, and it doesn’t have to be any more than a 15 minute meeting.
[3:34] - 1 on 1
The power of individual face-to-face time
In addition to sharing and receiving information as a group, never underestimate the power of spending consistent, scheduled one-on-one time with each member of your team. In these settings, team members may share insights, frustrations, or ideas they don’t feel comfortable sharing in larger groups.
[6:52] - What Matters to You, Matters to Me
Ask questions first, give direction second
Mary advocates for devoting at least the first third of any one-on-one discussion to simply listening and asking questions. How are things going, inside and outside of the office? Are there projects you want to be involved in? Ideas you have? Not only is this a valuable time in which talented people can share their ideas, but you’ll also make each individual feel listened to and valued.
[10:34] - Conversations with Preparation
Invest time before the interaction, reap the rewards
Continuing on the theme of one on one conversations, both Mary and Jeanette stress the importance of preparation. We don’t prepare in advance for hangouts with our close personal friends, but your meetings, conversations, and discussions with either an individual or your entire team have objectives. When you spend even five minutes planning ahead— learning about the person’s interests, brainstorming targeted questions to ask them, etc.— your interactions will be much more valuable, productive, and valued by the other party.
FOLLOW:
ABOUT AHFTER HOURS:
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is the world’s largest HIV/AIDS service organization, operating in 45 countries globally. The mission? Providing cutting-edge medicine and advocacy for everyone, regardless of ability to pay.
The AHFter Hours podcast is an official podcast of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, in which host Lauren Hogan is joined by experts in a range of fields to educate, inform, and inspire listeners on topics that go far beyond medical information to cover leadership, creativity, and success.
Learn more at: https://www.aidshealth.org
ABOUT THE HOST:
Lauren Hogan is the Communications Manager for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and has been working in a series of roles with the Foundation since 2016. She’s passionate about increasing the public visibility of AIDS, the Foundation's critical work, and how everyday people can help join the fight to make cutting-edge medicine, treatment, and support available for anyone who needs it.
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Lauren Hogan:
Tune in for battle tested leadership skills that can be used on a day to day basis. Get the insights you need to foster change and drive business forward. These are professional development tools for immediate use that you won't want to miss. AHF is the world's largest HIV/AIDS service organization operating in 45 countries globally, 16 states domestically, including DC and Puerto Rico. Our mission is to provide cutting edge medicine and advocacy, regardless of ability to pay.
Lauren Hogan:
Hello and welcome to the After Hours podcast. I'm your host Lauren Hogan serving as your liaison to take you on a journey to learn more about AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Our topic of today is excel and elevate. Before we start the show, please make sure to remember to check out the show notes so you can follow along. Now, let's get started.
Lauren Hogan:
Well hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the After Hours podcast. As always, I'm your host Lauren Hogan, and today I have two very special guests with me. First, Jeanette, will you please introduce yourself?
Jeanette Alvarez:
Yes. I'm Jeanette Alvarez. I'm the northern regional for healthcare operations.
Lauren Hogan:
And we have one of our favorite HR people with us today too. Mary, can you introduce yourself?
Mary Cadahia:
Certainly My name is Mary Cadahia. I am the director of human resources for the southern bureau of AHF.
Lauren Hogan:
So just to kind of dive into it a little bit, can you guys just tell me what your respective roles are at AHF? You gave us your titles. So what are your day to day jobs entail at AHF? Jeanette, I'll go right back to you.
Jeanette Alvarez:
Yeah. So my day to day role is supporting the healthcare centers in the northern region with all administration, all healthcare operations, from soup to nuts and supporting, from the front desk to the doctors, and whatever administration operations needs they may have.
Lauren Hogan:
And Mary?
Mary Cadahia:
I support all of our business leaders, managers, helping them navigate the HR world, whether it be employee relations, simple, basic questions on payroll or 401K, any kind of benefits, those types of questions, as well as working with our employees, identifying concerns, possibilities for improvement in learning and career opportunities and those types of things is pretty much every day.
Lauren Hogan:
So the theme of this episode is one-on-one time, and how do you make the most of that? So staying in that lane, I want to go into our first official question to kick off this conversation and just ask what is a one-on-one meeting and why are they really necessary?
Mary Cadahia:
I'll start. As an HR professional, it's extremely important for us to encourage our managers and supervisors to have these discussions with the staff. That's the best way to stay connected. It makes them feel valuable. They like to be heard, and it doesn't have to be an hour meeting. It can be anywhere from 15 minutes to a half an hour. Depends on the individual, and again, it's extremely important just to have that engagement with each other so you can understand, they can understand where you're coming from, you can understand where they're coming from, projects that they can be working on with you. There's all kinds of different things that you can address in the one-on-one that will be beneficial to both parties.
Lauren Hogan:
Jeanette, your thoughts?
Jeanette Alvarez:
Yes. So the one-on-one time for me is, it's like gold time for me with my team, and the reason they're important is when you collaborate, you coach and you communicate what's going on or a specific focus, and the one-on-one came to be, at least for my department, as the department of medicine grew so did the need for connection because as departments grow you have to make sure that you could still have that one-on-one time when you are a smaller group. So it's really important to have that time with the staff.
Lauren Hogan:
So how often do you guys think that you should meet one-on-one, because we at AHF, we know we have tons of meetings always, we're always being pulled into different meetings, but how often do you guys think is, we should be having these one-on-one meetings?
Mary Cadahia:
I personally conduct mine with my direct reports once a week. It's extremely important to me. I have some people that are here with me in south Florida, but I also have team members in Texas and Atlanta. So in order to stay on top of everything within the bureau, it's important to me to link up with them at least once a week. It's extremely important that we make it happen. As you said, we're always going in so many different directions. We all travel at some point. So it's important that you maintain those meetings no matter what, making sure that if you are going to be out of pocket you reschedule it, because again, it's so easy to fall off the pattern, that getting back on the pattern makes it hard.
Mary Cadahia:
And again, just making sure you're keeping that connection on a constant level, that's the best way to encourage participation, get ideas, do best practices. Those are the best formats for this to be, and my recommendation is 30 minutes. I think that's more than enough time if you do it on a regular basis. I have a one-on-one with my supervisor once a week. I have a one-on-one with my bureau chief once a month. So again, those are key for me as for development. So I think it's extremely important at all levels of the organization for us to have those meetings.
Jeanette Alvarez:
So for me Lauren, and my team is a little bit of a mix. We have the seasons OAPM's are biweekly, and the new OAPM's will be weekly. But I do have a few that want to speak to me, want to have that one-on-one connection every week. So I meet them where they are if they need that connection maybe for the next three weeks, or we could switch to biweekly. I never go, let it go past two, every two weeks. But one thing I do is connect every week with each of the OAPM's. They, I want to feel connected, and they want to feel connected to their support because we spoke... As I support them, they also support me of course.
Lauren Hogan:
So Mary, you actually kind of touched on this, so I'm going to jump right back to you. You talked about best practices and different things that you can conduct in your one-on-one. So that kind of segues right into the next question of what should you be talking about to make sure that your one-on-one is most productive?
Mary Cadahia:
I like to split my time. I like to give them, for instance if we're using a 30 minute format, I like to give of them 10 minutes for them to talk to me. What's going on in your world? How are things going, both in the office, outside of the office, and then I will spend 10 minutes going over what my expectations are and where I see is going until our next meeting and what deadlines I might have available. Any information that's been shared with me from a director level that I can disseminate to my staff, I would do that at that point as well, and then spend the last few minutes about growth and development. Are there things you want to be involved in?
Mary Cadahia:
How we are, we're very big in our advocacy. I'm more than happy to have somebody participate if that's something they're passionate about. So talking about those opportunities as well. I think those are extremely important, and then if you're gauging that time, no one thing is encompassing the whole meeting. We're going to try and keep it as evenly distributed as possible, because again, I think that way gives us more opportunities to address our own as well as their concerns and things that we might be able to work on together.
Jeanette Alvarez:
Yeah, and to piggyback on what Mary said, we, I always start with what's going on in... It's sometimes in their personal lives, or in the healthcare center, and then once we can talk about that because that's what's most important for them at that moment, then we will talk about the focus metric, how we can meet it, how we can do better. I always celebrate because there's always something to celebrate, even when there's a negative, we can find a positive in that negative, and also, I also want to make sure that staff members that are not under, directly under me, can reach out to their supervisor and have a one-on-one. It's not just always OAPM's. It's open to everybody in the healthcare center.
Lauren Hogan:
So I kind of have a follow up to that, and it's more so what advice would you guys give to managers who may not have the most productive one-on-ones from their subordinate's point of view, whether it's they don't feel as though they're being helpful or they're not being very intuitive to what's actually happening maybe in the day to day work that they're doing, or they just don't feel like it's overall, they're actually getting anything out of it, what advice would you give those managers as to how they can improve and help their subordinates in these one-on-ones?
Mary Cadahia:
The first thing I would tell them to do, and be really self aware of, is active listening. Listen to what they're telling you. Don't listen to reply. I find that that's something that we do a lot, whether it's intentional or not, and just really pay attention to what they're asking you and the information they're requesting from you, not what you think they want the reply to be. That would be, to me that's the most important thing to do when you set out to do these one-on-one meetings, is to make sure that you're actively listening. We have all kinds of things we want to talk about. We owe them the same courtesy of listening to them and really understanding what their questions are and addressing their needs. We can't always come out with the best result, but I think it goes a long way for our staff and our retention if they feel listened to, we've paid attention, and then we explain why we can or maybe cannot do what they think the end result should be.
Lauren Hogan:
Jeanette?
Jeanette Alvarez:
Yes, I agree. Yeah. I agree with Mary as well. One of the things that I would say come prepared. Be prepared for the team member. Make sure that your one-on-ones are at a time when they can listen and it's comfortable for them. So ask them can, would you like to do this during the admin time? Do you want to do this... There's some ways that we do it after hours, and I will take those 30 minutes at six o' clock because I know they can relax and meet with me. So I think that's really important. Another thing is if I have to reschedule because I'm traveling, I make sure I tell them ahead of time. I give them that opportunity to reschedule if it works with them because their time is just as valuable as yours, and then one of the things that Mary said was always be ready to listen, to really that when you end the call you can tell that you are productive and that they left and they want to come back and have their next one-on-one with you.
Lauren Hogan:
So in that same lane actually, does it make sense to utilize the one-on-one for development discussions with your team members?
Mary Cadahia:
Absolutely, because again, you're talking about things that they're going to be addressing, things that you're going to be addressing, and then you can work collaboratively on what is the best step forward. What do you see next for yourself is always an open-ended question for them. What are your interests? What would you like to be involved in that we have going on right now that might be a step outside of your comfort zone? Those are things that we can address during these brief meetings, and it grows from there. Then you start to get a feel for what their interests are, what their interests aren't, things that you know for sure they wouldn't be interested in doing. But again, actively listening to that, you're going to have that base for every time you meet to be able to tap back into and keep those constructive conversations going.
Jeanette Alvarez:
Yeah, I feel the same. It's, absolutely, I think it's the best, perfect time, and I don't think those conversations will be so off the wall because like Mary just stated it's a conversation that's going to grow. So it's not going to be a surprise if they want to have a career development, if they want to go to school, if they want to move to another business line. You can have a discussion, and one of the things that I always make sure is that my team is open to, I want to move to another... They're not afraid to say they want to move on because somebody gave me the opportunity in AHF and I've moved on and I want to give them the same opportunity to have that comfort.
Lauren Hogan:
I think that's something that's really key that we should highlight actually, is that I think people have preconceived notions in terms of "Well, I have a degree in X so I can only stay in this lane in terms of career development or career path." I think that's the unique thing about AHF. As long as you have a degree, you're able to kind of create your own lane in terms of what you're passionate about at this organization, which I think is really important and goes towards the career development that we talk about, the employee engagement, and ultimately that goes to retention numbers. So I think that's really great that you pointed that out Jeanette.
Mary Cadahia:
Yeah, and that's absolutely true.
Lauren Hogan:
Yeah, absolutely. So my next question to you guys would be can you only, or can you discuss not only the positive in these one-on-ones, but constructive feedback as well in this form?
Mary Cadahia:
Absolutely. I think that's the key to the one-on-one. That's, we're working on things collectively all the time. If you ran into a blip with one particular thing and with one individual, let's talk about it. Let's see how we can either do better or manage it better next time, and again, offering my expertise for what it is to help them navigate the next situation, and it should be two way. I don't support any one meeting that's all "Rah rah" or all "You don't know what you're doing." We need to have a nice, collaborative discussion because you wouldn't be employed here if you didn't have some value add. So we want to make sure that we're paying attention to both. Sometimes it's a little out balance, but for the most part, again, with if you keep these ongoing, there are more learning opportunities than either a bashing session or a rah rah session. We're really going through things that count. They can be very meaningful in the end.
Jeanette Alvarez:
Yeah, absolutely. Constructive feedback and negative feedback, it's part of the one-on-one. You can have one week where we'll just discover maybe it's not a direct negative for that OA or PM. It may be something that happened at the healthcare center, but we use the platform for both. So it's really a conversation of the good, the bad, and the ugly, and just, and I always say instead of the good, the bad, and the ugly, the good and the bad and what do we go from here? There's always a positive to flip it. You can always flip the situation.
Lauren Hogan:
So, a follow up to that, does constructive feedback go both ways? So let's say that your subordinate or somebody that's reporting to you has some constructive feedback to you in terms of how these one-on-ones could be better or maybe some things that the manager can actually approve upon. Do you guys think that that's always well received, or how should someone go about doing that?
Mary Cadahia:
I'm not so sure it's always well received, but I do believe that is the best way for us as supervisors and managers to learn. We do, I've been with the organization for 11 years, so a lot of stuff is just repetitive. So if somebody can point something out to me that I'm so ingrained in that is either outdated or should be improved or maybe done on a different format, I'm all about it. I think that I need to keep growing just like everybody else. I can understand sometimes it may not be well received, but it's all, I say this all the time, it's in the delivery.
Mary Cadahia:
If you have a discussion with your supervisor and you're honest with your feedback in asking them, and you can always put it to them, "I'm going to mention something that may not be comfortable," and just put it out there. I think we have to do the same thing. We do that anyway all the time. So don't be afraid to have those open, frank discussions with your supervisors, especially during these one-on-ones, because it's just the two of you, you're talking about development, and that is always a two-way street.
Jeanette Alvarez:
Yeah. It's not always well received, but I think it's necessary to have that two-way street, as long as it's said, of course respectively. But I myself have learned so much from the team that it goes both ways, and if they tell me, I have a staff member that's great with spreadsheets. He showed us how to do spreadsheets for retention. He's making us work smarter, not harder. So it's always welcomed to the growth, at least for me. Maybe for others, it's not easily received. But again, it's the way they send me the message.
Lauren Hogan:
So we are almost at time guys, but I do have one final question, and that is what would be the number one takeaway that you would, or advice that you guys would give, like this is top priority that you should always apply no matter what, in these one-on-one meetings?
Mary Cadahia:
I think you have to make sure, as Jeanette said earlier, you need to be prepared. You need to make sure you set that time aside. No phone calls, no emails, don't check your cell phone. Really focus and make sure you're hearing what they have to say because if you give them that respect, you're going to get that respect back, and I think that's a lot of what the one-on-one's about. You have to have equal respect for each other. You respect the role that they're providing and the services they're providing to us, and hopefully they're respectful of you, your time, and your expertise as a supervisor.
Jeanette Alvarez:
Yeah. What advice? I have great one-on-ones with my, I have a weekly with my bureau chief and a weekly with A.J. Alegria who is my direct supervisor, and they come prepared, we're ready to rock and roll. I do the same thing for my team. So I would say be prepared, be consistent, and, like Mary said, I am one of those that have taken the phone because somebody's calling me in an emergency, and I really try not to do that. But they understand that if I'm with that other person, I will answer the phone for them. So I try to really keep it, the 30 minutes, to be all about them, and I hope that I am right, but I think my team enjoys that time, the 30 minutes. So I think it's an investment. If you want a team that works together, you have to invest the time, and it doesn't happen overnight. It's something that grows, the relationship grows as you go.
Lauren Hogan:
So I'm just going to sum all of this up because I think there were some great gems in there. I heard be prepared. I heard take the time, listen, be respectful, and ultimately take that time. That's the most important part. So...
Mary Cadahia:
Absolutely.
Lauren Hogan:
So I have to say thank you both so much for joining us for this episode. This is really great. I hope that those that are listening will have some new takeaways and maybe make some adjustments to their strategies on these one-on-ones, but this information was very helpful. So thank you both.
Mary Cadahia:
Thank you.
Jeanette Alvarez:
Thank you for having me.
Lauren Hogan:
AHF is special in that we are open and receptive to what you say. Your voice matters. So if you have ideas for trainings, what you want to do next, how you want to grow, we encourage you to speak to your manager, or you can simply reach out to your HR team directly. We are here to help and we will brainstorm together to create your path.
Lauren Hogan:
The employee life cycle starts the day the person accepts the offer and lasts until the day that person leaves. At AHF, it's important to us to continue to develop employees throughout their entire time here, as an employee at any level. It's important to stay curious and continue to grow.
Lauren Hogan:
Thank you so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the show, please subscribe, share it with your friends, like, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. Follow us on Instagram @afterhours, and see you next time.