The Introductory 1-1 Challenge

It’s your first day at a new job. Your manager suggests you set up 1-1 meetings with a stack of new folks - some of whom are on your team, and some of whom are stakeholders on other teams who will be important partners to you. She provides you with a list of names and tells you to get started. 

Where do you go from here? Unlike a traditional meeting, this session has no clear agenda, no tactical problem to solve, and you often haven’t even met the person. Worse, some of the folks your manager suggested are likely quite senior to you, and you don’t know whether they are expecting you or have the time or interest in connecting. Spending your first week in meetings like this is a daunting way to start a new job.   

Fortunately, there are a handful of best practices that you can apply to help this process go smoothly. 

Best Practices for an Introductory 1-1

Start with the basic template

Unlike most other meetings, where a group of people are getting together to discuss a set agenda or work through a specific problem, introductory 1-1s are a little more vague - two colleagues are meeting to “catch up” or “get to know each other.” This is great in theory, but what do you actually say when the meeting starts? What do you talk about?

Fortunately, introductory 1-1s have an unwritten but largely pre-defined agenda. For the average 30 minute meet-and-greet, the agenda looks something like this:

• Opener and greetings (5 minutes).
• Back and forth introductions, including follow ups (15 minutes)
• Questions and discussion (10 minutes)

See below for more information on what is typically included in each section. 

Opener and greetings (5 minutes)

What happens

In this section, the pair meets, exchanges greetings and gets settled.

Examples

• “Great to meet you! How have your first couple days been?”
• “Good to finally meet you. Everyone says you are the company expert on…” 

Back and forth introductions (15 minutes)

What happens

Each person introduces themselves. This generally involves stating their role today, how long they’ve been at the organization, and a short summary of what they did before joining the organization. After each person’s introduction, the other person often has follow up questions. 

Examples

• “Quick background on me… I’ve joined as the PM for the mobile team, which I’m really fired up about. Before joining, I started my career in customer success, but moved into product about 5 years ago. Since then I’ve worked as a PM at ABC Co - I spent a couple of years managing their internal tools, and then moved to the mobile app team there.”  
• "A little about me - I spent the past four years as a development manager at XYZ Co, mostly working on the main customer facing application, but also supporting the marketing site, billing team and bunch of other projects."

Questions and discussion (10 minutes)

What happens

Both partners ask any relevant questions to help each other get oriented on their respective roles, and begin to build a relationship.

Examples

• “So you work on the platform product. I’m still wrapping my head around what that is - can you give me a bit of background?”
• I've seen the company has a marketing operations team, as well as core marketing team. I've never worked anywhere with this kind of structure - can you tell me a bit more about how it works?"

Make the agenda explicit

While the playbook described in the table above is pretty straightforward, it often isn’t stated, leading the conversation to kick off awkwardly with no clear roadmap on how you both plan to spend the time together.

To clear the air, grab the wheel and casually make this implicit agenda explicit, stating the rough plan for the conversation. For example, after exchanging some basic greetings, you might say: “So I was thinking - maybe we start by sharing a quick introduction on our respective roles and background? And then after that, I’d love to ask you a few questions about your role as I find my way around here. Would that work?”

Opening the conversation in this way clarifies to both parties that you are on the same page about your plan for the discussion and avoids the awkward fumbling that can accompany a meeting with no set agenda.

Pre-share some personal information

One way to really maximize the use of this time is to have these meetings after sharing your New Hire Intro. Doing so provides material that can significantly increase the quality and energy of that first conversation. One worker at a globally distributed technology company shared with us, “after I posted my intro blog to our team’s Slack channel, practically every introductory 1-1 I had started with ‘I read your blog and…’ The quality and depth of conversations that my intro blog was driving in my first week took me 6 months at my last company.” 

Use a joint introduction (manager-driven 1-1s)

A manager-driven 1-1 is a meeting between the new hire and a coworker that the manager specifically suggested that the new hire meet. These are often the peers or stakeholders that the manager feels will have the valuable context to share with the new hire, or will become a key partner of the new hire going forward. 

A common challenge for the new hire arises from how manager-driven 1-1s are initiated. Typically, the manager will simply write out a list of names and ask the new hire to “reach out and connect” with these people. While this may seem straightforward, asking new hires to reach out to busy coworkers they’ve never met before can be daunting, especially if those coworkers are senior to them. 

The Welcomepage team hears this a lot in our research, when we talk to new employees about their onboarding experience. “I’m super conscious of hierarchies,” shared one recent interviewee, who worked at a global software company, “so when I was told to reach out to a bunch of senior folks, it was extremely uncomfortable. Did they even know who I was, or why I was hired? Would they be annoyed? Booking meetings with someone ‘higher up’ than me, especially that early in my tenure, was not an easy thing for me to do.”

Fortunately, resolving this problem is simple - use a joint introduction. A joint introduction is a simple note (via email, Slack or Teams), where a manager introduces the new hire, and the person they’d like the new hire to meet, and which explains why the manager is making the introduction. This explanation can be as simple as “X has just joined and I want her to connect with people she will be working closely with” or more detailed if there is a specific topic you are hoping the existing employee can explore with the new hire. This simple note sets context for both parties, and gives the new hire the reassurance that they can reach out to their coworker without concern that they are being an annoyance.

Here is a sample joint introduction:

‍Hi @Rebecca - introducing @Rachel, who just joined our mobile team as product manager this week (check out her Welcomepage here!)

‍I suggested to @Rachel that you two connect, as you have so much context into the history of the mobile app and the rebuild underway today. I also think you’ll probably work together a lot over the coming months on the upcoming launch so it's worthwhile connecting. 

‍@Rachel - @Rebecca is the superstar product marketing manager supporting the mobile team. 

Incentivize it via a "coffee card system" (self-driven 1-1s)

“Self-driven 1-1s” are introductory 1-1s that were not requested by the new hire’s manager, but that were initiated by the new hire themselves in the course of their onboarding. This often happens when multiple manager-selected 1-1s end with “oh, you have to meet X”, indicating that there is a coworker who the manager may have not considered, but will be important for the new hire’s role.

Ideally, your company culture already welcomes anyone reaching out to anyone else - especially new hires looking to find their feet. Still, even in this welcoming environment, new hires can still feel uncomfortable requesting time from others, especially with coworkers who are more senior, very busy, or with whom they may not have an immediate professional intersection, but whom they’d like to meet anyway. 

One great way to overcome this discomfort is by introducing a “coffee card” system. Here’s how it works: 

• Every new hire is given 3 - 5 “coffee cards” on their first day. A coffee card is typically a gift card to the local coffee shop (if in person) or digital Starbucks card (if distributed or remote - bulk gift card services like Giftbit make this easy). 
• Each card is loaded with enough funds for two people to get the beverage of their choice - typically around $10 per meeting.
• The new hire is instructed to spend these cards by the end of their first month by taking people across the organization out for coffee. Consuming these cards becomes a formal onboarding task.
• If relevant, the organization can put certain criteria on how these cards are spent - for example, at least 2 cards must be spent with people in functions outside of your own, one must be spent on someone from senior management, etc. 

The coffee system has three benefits:

1. Gives new hires permission to connect. By investing financially in the process, and making spending the coffee cards a required task of onboarding, this practice gives new hires the permission (in fact, the requirement) to reach out to new people at the organization, with the peace of mind that these people are expecting to hear from them, and that this request for their time is an expected part of the culture. 
2. Infuses a delightful perk into internal networking. Meeting a new teammate for coffee is usually fun. Adding in a free premium coffee or tea is extra delightful and makes the prospect of taking time for this meeting more appealing, even on a busy day.  
3. Signals a social culture from day one. Adding a coffee card system to your onboarding program sends a clear message to new hires, and the rest of your team, that building relationships is important and valued and your organization. 

Toronto startup Hubdoc (now owned by Xero) ran a system like this for many years. Here’s how an engineering director there described it: “The coffee system was the absolute best part of onboarding. It’s how I met so many key people. I felt like it gave me permission to reach out to people because there was a system in place. And everyone took breaks anyway, and loved getting a free latté.”