Key themes are labels that you attach to conversations, meetings, and other activity to track recurring topics. This guide explains how to create themes and link them to your management activity.
Creating a New Theme
Choosing the Right Themes
Start with a small set of themes that reflect the most common topics in your management conversations. Five to ten themes is a good starting point. You can always add more as new patterns emerge.
Common themes for management work include:
- Workload and capacity
- Career development and progression
- Team dynamics and collaboration
- Process improvement
- Technical challenges
- Communication
- Wellbeing and work-life balance
Avoid creating themes that are too broad ("Work stuff") or too narrow ("Monday stand-up format"). The best themes are specific enough to be meaningful but broad enough to apply across multiple conversations.
Linking Themes to Entities
You can link themes to catchups, meetings, surveys, and retrospectives. When recording or editing one of these items, you will see an option to add key themes.
For example, if a catchup discussion touches on workload concerns and career development, you would link both of those themes to the catchup. This creates a connection that you can trace later.
Linking is quick and lightweight. It takes only a moment to tag the relevant themes, but the cumulative benefit of consistent tagging is significant. Over weeks and months, your theme data reveals which topics dominate your management conversations.
When to Link
Tag themes whenever a topic is meaningfully discussed, not just mentioned in passing. If a team member briefly mentions their workload but the conversation quickly moves on, you might not tag it. But if workload is a significant part of the discussion, tag it.
Consistency matters more than precision. It is better to tag slightly too much than to tag too little, because missing tags create gaps in your trend data.
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