So, each and every week these leaders have a brief check-in with each team member, during which they ask two simple questions:

What are your priorities this week?

How can I help?

They are not looking for a to-do list from the team member. They simply want to discuss the team member’s priorities, obstacles, and solutions in real time, while the work itself is ongoing.

Actually, the data reveals that checking in with your team members once a month is literally worse than useless. While team leaders who check in once a week see, on average, a 13 percent increase in team engagement, those who check in only once a month see a 5 percent decrease in engagement.

The more frequently and predictably you check in with your people or meet with your team—the more you offer your real-time attention to the reality of their work—the more performance and engagement you will get.

A check-in is a fifteen-minute conversation that you have with your team leader each week about your upcoming week. This conversation is built on your answers to four short questions, two about last week, two about this week:

What activities did I love last week?

What activities did I loathe last week?

What are my priorities this week?

What help do I need from you, my team leader?

In trying to persuade your team leader to establish a check-in routine with you, here’s some data that’ll help:

• Those team leaders who check in every week drive their team members’ engagement scores up 77 percent, and their team members’ voluntary turnover in the next six months down 67 percent.

• It doesn’t matter whether the check-in happens in person, by phone, by email, or in an app. What matters is simply that it happens.

• Leaders who wind up actually having this interaction with the team member about the four questions/answers drive statistically higher levels of performance and engagement in their team members. Here, too, it doesn’t matter if the interaction is voice to voice or text to text.

• Ratings of quality don’t seem to matter: even if you and your team leader don’t have a genius coaching moment during one check-in, don’t worry about it. You’re going to check in again next week, and maybe something will strike both of you then. What matters with a check-in is that it happens frequently, not necessarily that it happens brilliantly. When it comes to leading, frequency trumps quality.