Why Good Employees Stop Speaking Up in 1-on-1 Meetings

One of the more concerning things that can happen in a 1-on-1 meeting is also one of the easiest to miss.

Your employee stops telling you things.

The meetings still happen. They show up on time. You ask how things are going and they say, “Good.” You ask whether they need anything from you and they say, “Nope, I think I’m good.” You talk about a few projects, maybe cover some upcoming deadlines, and twenty minutes later you both get back to work.

From a manager’s perspective, that can actually feel like a pretty successful meeting.

It may not be.

Good employees generally do not stop having opinions, concerns, ideas, or frustrations. They stop deciding that sharing them with you is worthwhile.

There is an important difference.

Employees learn what happens when they speak up

Think about the last few times someone on your team raised a concern with you.

What happened next?

• Maybe you explained why the situation was the way it was.

• Maybe you immediately offered a solution.

• Maybe you disagreed with their assessment.

• Maybe you told them you would look into it and, somewhere between that meeting and the seventeen other things competing for your attention, you forgot.

None of those responses necessarily make you a bad manager.

But your employees are paying attention.

When someone brings an issue to you, particularly one that requires some vulnerability on their part, what happens afterward teaches them something about whether they should do it again.

If I raise a concern and my manager gets defensive, I learn something.

If I offer an idea and it is immediately dismissed, I learn something.

If I bring up the same problem during three consecutive 1-on-1 meetings and nothing ever happens, I definitely learn something.

Eventually, “Everything is good” becomes a lot easier.

Listening and agreeing are not the same thing

Managers sometimes get themselves into trouble here because they believe listening means they need to agree with the employee or fix whatever has been raised.

It doesn’t.

There are going to be complaints you cannot resolve. There will be suggestions you disagree with. Employees will occasionally have only part of the story. And sometimes the answer really is no.

You can still listen.

In fact, one of the fastest ways to shut down honest communication is to spend the entire time someone is talking preparing your response.

Ask another question instead.

• Why do you think that is happening?

• How is that affecting you?

• What would you change?

• What am I missing?

You may ultimately reach exactly the same conclusion you would have reached five minutes earlier, but you will probably understand the issue better. More importantly, the person sitting across from you knows you made an effort to understand it.

That matters.

Follow-through may matter even more

There is another reason employees stop bringing things up: nothing happens.

This one is particularly dangerous because managers are usually not intentionally ignoring their employees.

You have your own meetings, deadlines, customers, employees, projects, and manager to worry about. Something discussed during a Tuesday afternoon 1-on-1 can easily disappear by Thursday morning.

Your employee doesn’t necessarily see everything that happened between Tuesday and Thursday. They just know they told you something important and nothing happened.

CRITICAL POINT: This does not mean every conversation needs to produce an action item. It does mean that when you say you are going to do something, you need to either do it or come back and explain why you couldn’t.

Sometimes the follow-up is simply:

“I looked into what we discussed. I can’t change it right now, and here is why.”

That may not be the answer the employee wanted, but it is an answer.

Silence is an answer too. Just probably not the one you intended to give.

Be careful with your best employees

There is a tendency to spend most of our management energy where the problems are.

That makes sense. The struggling employee needs coaching. The new employee needs support. The “difficult" employee requires attention.

Meanwhile, your best employee is doing exactly what you hoped they would do: performing well and requiring very little of your time.

So you give them very little of your time.

That can also become a problem.

High-performing employees still need to be challenged, recognized, listened to, and given opportunities to grow. They also tend to see problems before they become obvious because they understand the work well.

If one of your most engaged employees used to come into your 1-on-1 meetings with ideas and questions and now mostly gives you status updates, I would pay attention to that change.

Don’t immediately assume they are disengaged. There could be any number of explanations.

Ask.

Your 1-on-1 should be one of the safest places to disagree with you

Managers frequently say they want honest feedback.

Employees frequently hear something slightly different:

“We want honest feedback as long as we agree with it.”

If you want people to challenge you, you have to demonstrate that challenging you is actually safe.

That doesn’t happen because you tell your team, “My door is always open.”

It happens over time.

It happens when someone disagrees with you and you don’t become defensive. When someone identifies a mistake and you acknowledge it. When an employee raises a difficult issue and you don’t punish the messenger. When you say you will follow up and then actually follow up.

Trust is built in relatively small moments like these.

Unfortunately, it can also be damaged in the same relatively small moments.

Pay attention when the conversation gets easier

A 1-on-1 meeting becoming easier isn’t always a sign that things are getting better.

Sometimes it means you have built a strong relationship and communication is flowing naturally.

Sometimes it means the employee has decided there is no longer much value in saying what they really think.

As managers, our job is to figure out which one we are looking at.

Ask questions. Listen to the answers. Follow up on what you hear. Keep track of commitments. And, perhaps most importantly, pay attention when someone who used to have a lot to say suddenly doesn’t.

Winning 1-on-1s™ was built around much of this thinking. The goal isn’t to turn a conversation into a process for the sake of having a process. It is to provide enough structure, history, and follow-through that meaningful conversations don’t gradually become status meetings.

Because your employee saying “everything is good” and everything actually being good are two very different things.

If that sounds useful, take a look at winning1-on-1s.com.