The SDD focuses on your daily working life and gives an opportunity for a more in-depth dialogue and for balancing expectations concerning goals, tasks, well-being, cooperative relations and personal and professional development.
As an employee - together with your manager -, you have a responsibility for making the SDD good, constructive and honest.
It is your responsibility to raise topics that are important to discuss in relation to your work.
You should therefore consider:
If you give this proper consideration, you help to ensure that you will talk about the most important matters during the dialogue.
Your manager will invite you to an SDD dialogue and ask you to complete a dialogue guide before the meeting. The things you write in the guide are your own notes for the dialogue. The dialogue will be about:
Please also consider whether you have reached the development objectives and completed the activities you agreed on during the last SDD. Also consider different competence development opportunities.
You will be well-prepared if you write down challenges, needs and ideas during the year. In this way, you can ensure that your experiences in relation to well-being and assignments are not only based on the last few months.
If you have not started writing things down, it is a good idea to start now.
During the staff development dialogue, you and your manager will agree on one or more development objectives or activities for the coming year.
Please contact your manager during the year if it is difficult for you to comply with the agreements. Maybe the objectives should be adjusted, or you need to consider another competency development method.
The dialogue guide contains suggestions which means that it is fine to ask supplementary questions, leave out sub-questions and ask the questions in another order than specified in the guide.
The idea is to create a fluent dialogue with both the manager and the employee asking questions which come to them naturally. However, as a minimum, the dialogue should cover the three main themes in the dialogue guide.
1. What has happened since the last SDD? – A good starting point for talking about the future
2. Well-being and job satisfaction
3. Future tasks and competence development
You can find the dialogue guides here:
An SDD usually lasts approx. 1.5 hours.
In the dialogue, you will cover the topics in the dialogue guide. However, you will often start the dialogue by defining whether there are special topics you want to focus particularly on during the dialogue. Maybe a particularly challenging task requires new competencies.
An SDD is a mutual development dialogue which focuses on the future. An SDD is not a replacement for ongoing dialogue and feedback. Nor is it an occasion to discuss problems and focus on accumulated points of criticism.
A quality SDD which has meaning and impact requires that you and your manager make an effort to conduct a dialogue that focuses on the future and on development.
A dialogue that leads to development requires that you listen to each other and try to understand the basis of what is being said by asking elaborating questions instead of arguing against the points that are being made. Read: How to give constructive feedback.
As part of the SDD process, the intention is that you and your manager give each other feedback on, for example, work performance and collaboration during the past year.
To ensure that the feedback can be used constructively, it is a good idea to use this simple feedback model:
Start with a specific example, for example a situation or a quote which calls for feedback.
Repeat facts without trying to interpret them.
Your experience is about you, and sentences such as ‘I feel/become/am...’ - e.g. impressed, confused, insecure, sceptical, happy, relieved, inspired, unhappy, proud or angry - should be used.
Judgemental expressions are not suitable for giving feedback, for example ‘You are so …’, ‘You always get …’
Say what you want the other person to do.
Say what you wish for and what you want in future rather than what you don’t want.