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Lab651 Process

Engineering One-On-Ones

The Engineering One-On-Ones are a vital meeting that helps engineering leadership understand the engineer as a person and helps the engineer understand that engineering leadership (and the leadership, as a whole) is open and available. Additionally, it gives the engineer a forum where questions can be asked and concerns can be expressed, and gives engineering leadership an opportunity to help, promote and guide the engineer.

The One-On-One should be between the direct leader and the direct report. For instance, a team lead would have the meetings with their direct reports and the Head of Engineering would have the meetings with the team leads.

The meetings should be performed for both employees and contractors. The cadence for employees is every 3 weeks and for contractors every 2 weeks. The reason for the difference is that there is an additional weekly touch-point in the L10s for employees that does not exist for contractors.

The meeting should be friendly and any topic can be discussed. It’s important to know the person, so ask questions. When performing the meeting the primary goal is to listen to the engineer and find the “temperature” — their level of satisfaction, excitement, burn-out, etc. The meeting is also the opportunity to bring feedback from the client to the engineer to either praise or guide them. This meeting cannot be taken lightly.

Some questions to ask:

  1. How are you liking the work you are doing?
  2. Do you feel satisfied with the work?
  3. How is the family?
  4. Do you have anything fun outside of work planned?

In the end, an all-important question to ask is: “What can I do for you and is there anything that you need from me?”

Staff Augmentation Add-Ons

Section titled “Staff Augmentation Add-Ons”

In the event that the employee/contractor is a staff-augmentation placement (versus an internally run project) an additional set of questions can be asked:

  1. What are you hearing about the pains of the company? For example, “QA is never being done.”
  2. Do you see opportunity for other placements in the company?
Section titled “Related”