Dashboard
6 reasons people dont regularly schedule 1:1's with their direct reports
Arjun Rajkumar
November 29, 2024
One-on-one meetings help you address employee workloads, highlight success stories, find solutions to pain points, and give you and your employee space to talk about anything that is important to you and them. It does not have to be done in person. It can be instead done over email - where you ask your employees to send you a weekly status report.
Conducting regular, weekly or bi-weekly one-on-one's are a great way to become a better leader. Your employees feel like they are being heard, it gives you opportunities to mentor them, track progress, see what work got done, and what is coming up.
In this blog we are going to look at the top reasons people don't schedule 1:1's with their direct reports or with their direct leadership team, and provide counters to them.
1. If you are a new manager, you may not be aware of the importance of conducting regular 1:1's with your team. Many times people are promoted to be a manager (because they are very good at their work), without being trained on the best practices of managing people - and this results in them not doing weekly one-on-one's.
2. If you were an engineer, and then promoted to be a manager of engineers, you could end up not doing 1:1's because this is the first time you are a manager and no one told you the importance of 1:1's.
3. If someone suddenly retires, and you are expected to handle all their direct reports without any training, you could end up not doing 1:1's.
4. Your whole team uses Slack (or a similar tool) - and as you are available on them, and speak to your team regularly, you avoid 1:1's. We have seen that the conversation on Slack tends to be around on-going work (e.g fixing a bug, or talking about a pull request etc) - and cannot really replace a weekly check-in with the team. 1:1's and weekly check-ins are a good way to talk about work from a higher level - what they are happy with, what got done, what was missed and why etc. These things will get lost on Slack among all the other regular conversations that happen there.
5. You do not want to waste your employees' time. Your employees prefer doing actual work rather than spending time in meetings. This is a valid reason, and you can work on this by getting your 1:1's asynchronously, without meetings.
6. You are short-staffed and do not have the time for 1:1's. Again like above, this can be fixed by conducting them asynchronously. Being understaffed is a quick way to get other people quitting because they are doing more work, and they may have problems which are not being addressed. Weekly 1:1's are a good way to counter this and make sure that everyone is happy and work is getting done properly.
It's absolutely not normal to skip weekly check-in or 1:1's with your team. If you are not doing this at work, start this practice and become a better leader.
3. If someone suddenly retires, and you are expected to handle all their direct reports without any training, you could end up not doing 1:1's.
4. Your whole team uses Slack (or a similar tool) - and as you are available on them, and speak to your team regularly, you avoid 1:1's. We have seen that the conversation on Slack tends to be around on-going work (e.g fixing a bug, or talking about a pull request etc) - and cannot really replace a weekly check-in with the team. 1:1's and weekly check-ins are a good way to talk about work from a higher level - what they are happy with, what got done, what was missed and why etc. These things will get lost on Slack among all the other regular conversations that happen there.
5. You do not want to waste your employees' time. Your employees prefer doing actual work rather than spending time in meetings. This is a valid reason, and you can work on this by getting your 1:1's asynchronously, without meetings.
6. You are short-staffed and do not have the time for 1:1's. Again like above, this can be fixed by conducting them asynchronously. Being understaffed is a quick way to get other people quitting because they are doing more work, and they may have problems which are not being addressed. Weekly 1:1's are a good way to counter this and make sure that everyone is happy and work is getting done properly.
It's absolutely not normal to skip weekly check-in or 1:1's with your team. If you are not doing this at work, start this practice and become a better leader.
Automate status reports
2-3 days a week, or maybe once a week, depending on the schedule you choose, everyone on your team shares their status updates and any problems without wasting unnecessary time in a meeting.
Your team members will appreciate starting their week seeing everyone else’s accomplishments and goals, and ending it with sharing their own - and everyone in your team starts to see the bigger picture of what's happening.