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.

Each check-in, then, is a chance to offer a tip, or an idea that can help the team member overcome a real-world obstacle, or a suggestion for how to refine a particular skill. Check-ins can be short—ten to fifteen minutes —but that’s plenty of time to do a little real-time learning and coaching. And, like all good coaching, this has to be rooted in the specifics of the particular situation the team member is facing, the psychology she is bringing to it, the strengths she possesses, and the strategies she might already have tried. Again, the only way to surface these sorts of microdetails is to make sure that the conversations are frequent.

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.

If you are yourself a team leader, it will serve you well to establish the check-in as one of your core rituals, what General Electric calls your standard leader behaviors.