Questions to Ask Your Employees Every Week

Leadership can be tough, especially in today’s environment.  However, a lot of leaders overthink how to manage their employees.  At the end of the day, employees just want to be enabled, empowered, and inspired.  But how do you achieve that?  Well, it starts with keeping an open line of communication with them and being intentional with that communication. Not sure where to begin?   This list of questions to ask your employees every week is a great place to start.

Conversation Basics

But before we begin, let’s start with the basics. As a leader, it is important that you treat employees like you would want to be treated.  You want your boss to believe that you have good intentions and want to succeed, right?  Your employees crave the same thing.   Work hard to go into every conversation with an employee with an open mind and heart.   Work to remove any bias and preconceived notions.

The next basic is that you must be genuine with the conversations.  if you are asking these questions to check it off your list, your employee will see right through that.  You need to be genuine and sincerely want to have the conversation and make it easier for your employees to be successful.  This means, holding off on a conversation if you are not in the right mindset. it also means being vulnerable and transparent in every conversation.   <If you want to learn more about vulnerability, I recommend that you read every book from Rene Brown!   It will transform your leadership!>

You should also hold yourself accountable.  The more you talk to your employee, the more they will talk.  The more they talk, the more you will understand what their challenges and struggles are.  Asking these questions weekly will ensure that you build that trust and set the groundwork for a consistent pipeline of communication. These conversations may feel awkward at first but push through that until they aren’t.  Eventually, you and your employee will look forward to your time together and you will both find yourselves more engaged and productive.

Questions to Ask Your Employees Every Week

How are you doing?

This first question seems easy enough, right? However, many managers don’t get it right.  At least once a week ask your employee how they are doing and genuinely listen to their response. Your employees are people with very real issues, concerns, and feelings both at work and at home.  Your job as a leader is to continue to check-in and show that you care about their wellbeing.

This question is not just a great way to show that you care and build emotional trust, but it is also a great way to learn more about what is important to your employee and what motivates them.  For example, when my manager asks me how I am doing, I always bring up my kids because they are the most important people to me.  My manager picks up on this and takes great care to ensure that I am able to have a work/life balance because that is important to me.

What are you proud of this week?

This is a great question to ask your employee every week because it gives them the opportunity to showcase their best work.  As a manager, you are likely very busy so it can be really easy to miss some of the contributions that your employees are making. Asking this helps minimize that.

In addition to allowing your employee to showcase their work, their response will also provide some insight into their priorities and passions.  This is important information that you can use as a leader to ensure that you are matching the right work with the right person.  For example, if your employee always talks about his ability to project manage, then you can ensure that they have opportunities to do that type of work more often.

What is Getting in Your Way?  How Can I help?

Your job as a leader is to make it easier for your team to do their best work. Therefore, it is essential that you have a firm understanding of what is getting in their way.   Are their processes slowing them down?  Do they have the right tools and resources?  Are they struggling with a partner or customer?

Once you find out, ask them what you can do to help support them.   Just asking the question shows helps build emotional trust.

As an aside, don’t be surprised if they say that YOU are the bottleneck.  If that is the case, thank your employee for letting you know. It takes a lot of courage to share that type of feedback and it indicates that they really care about the work. Next, come up with a plan to fix it.

Fixing it can mean giving up some control. For example, if you have to sign off on every email or document that your employee sends, perhaps you don’t have to do that anymore.   Or if it is a delay in communication, perhaps you set aside an hour every day for “office hours” where team members can pop in and ask you questions or get what they need from you.   Work with your team and ask them what they need.

What Did You Learn This Week?

Another goal of leaders is to grow and develop their talent.  Not only is this important for your employee’s engagement level, but it helps you build a more effective team.   Each week, ask your employee to share what they learned.  This will provide them an opportunity to share more about what they are interested in developing, where their skills are, and how they prefer to learn.

In addition, asking this question every week will keep your employees on their toes looking for learning opportunities. Asking them regularly will help hold them accountable to their own growth and development.

What Is On Your Mind?

This is the final of the questions that you should ask your employees every week, but one of the most important.  You want your employee to feel that they can come to you with anything.  Sometimes they may be apprehensive to doing so. Asking this question gives them an opportunity to do that.

By providing the space and time for the employee to discuss what is important to them, you are building valuable emotional trust.   In fact, as a leader this is one of my favorite questions to ask my team because it really allows me to learn their priorities and where they are in terms of engagement. Some of the best conversations and breakthroughs came from asking this simple question.

There you have it, a set of very simple questions that you can ask your employees.  This will help provide the framework to really get to know what is going on in your business, the challenges that your team is facing, how you can support them, and what is important to your team.

What are some questions that you have asked or been asked?   Leave a comment below!

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