Record a career conversation

What this achieves

A career conversation note is the written record of a one-to-one about somebody’s development, kept where both of you can find it. It holds what you discussed, what either of you agreed to do, and when you will pick it up again.

Required role: Administrator or Manager.

Steps

Go to Career & Growth → Conversations.
Choose the Employee from your direct reports.
Select New note.
Set the Date of the conversation.
Choose the Topics it covered.
Write the Notes. These are required.
Add each Action item, using Add for each one.
Set a Follow-up date if there is one.
Select Save note.

Topics

Option	Description
Career growth	Where the person is heading.
Performance	How the work is going.
Development plan	Progress against an existing plan.
Feedback	Feedback given or received.
Workload	Capacity and pressure.
Aspirations	A declared target role.
Skills	Capability, current or needed.
Personal	Circumstances affecting work.
Other	Anything else.

Topics are how these notes become searchable as a set rather than as a pile. A run of notes tagged Workload across a team is worth noticing.

The employee can read the note

Say this out loud in the conversation, because it changes what belongs in the note. Your employee sees their own conversation notes on this same screen, read-only: the date, the topics, the notes, the action items, and the follow-up date. Their empty state tells them their manager will share notes here after their one-to-ones.

There is no private manager-only note here. Anything you would not say to the person belongs somewhere other than this field.

Example: recording that James Whitfield asked about a move into management is fine and useful. Recording your unshared opinion of whether he is ready is not — that is a conversation to have with him, and this screen is not the place to store it instead.

Action items and follow-ups

Action items are separate from the notes because they are the part that has to happen. A note with three action items and no follow-up date is a list nobody has committed to a time for.

The screen shows Upcoming follow-ups for the next fourteen days across everyone you manage, so the follow-up date is the mechanism that brings a conversation back rather than a decoration on the record.

Example: Olivia Bennett sets a follow-up two weeks after agreeing a stretch assignment with James Whitfield. It appears in her follow-ups panel in time to matter.

Preparing for the next one

Generate AI Prep produces preparation material for a conversation. It costs AI credits, and the cost is shown beside the action before you run it.

The prepared content is not shown to the employee — it is your preparation, not part of the record they read. Treat it as prompts to consider, not as conclusions about the person; what ends up in the note is what you decide to write.

What happens next

Notes accumulate into a history for that person, which is what makes the next conversation continuous rather than a fresh start. Follow-up dates surface in your own upcoming list, and the action items are the raw material for a development plan when the same themes keep returning.