Ask HN: What's your opinion on weekly 1:1s?

> You have to do “team” things too, and part of that is knowing what your team mates and boss are doing and expecting. How are you planning on doing that without talking to them?

You can talk without having weekly scheduled 1:1s. If there's a topic that needs to be addressed and you are the one thinking about it first, then you gather the necessary people, you write the necessary text for them to know the context before the meeting happens, and you scheduled a meeting inviting the people you think should know about the topic. Having scheduled 1:1s is orthogonal. I like to treat my managers using the hollywood principle: "don't call me, I'll call you"

(Now former) people manager here. I had what I think was a pretty good system for managing a completely remote team that did very little group-based on work together:

1) Biweekly staff call. This was scheduled for an hour, with the understanding we would end it early if we ran out of things to talk about. Normal topics were company updates, new initiatives our team was expected to participate in and an open forum for discussion amongst the entire team.

2) Bi-weekly 1:1 calls, offset from the bi-weekly staff call. I set these for 30 minutes, but had a buffer in case they went long. These were the standard 1:1. For new hires, these were weekly for the first 6 months or so.

3) Adhoc communication in-between via text, Slack, Zoom, etc.

You (OP) mention not feeling like you need the calls. You are not alone in this feeling, and it might not be a “feeling.” You might not need the calls. When I was an IC, I never really understood the need for the calls either - if I needed something from my boss, I’d call him up and ask. Some people are like that.

When I became a manager, I scheduled those calls because that’s what you’re supposed to do and I was very concerned about doing what I was supposed to do. I hadn’t ever been a manager before, didn’t really know what I was doing, and had just been handed the reins of a high-producing team.

That said, I found most of the team did want an individual touch point. Some just wanted to shoot the breeze for a bit, others wanted to talk through a problem they had or show off something cool they had been working on. One guy scheduled his own 1:1 before I could and every time had a checklist he would go through, describing every significant thing he had worked on since we last spoke.

Over time, I evolved to the system I described above. My main goal was to ensure I talked to everyone at least once a week, mainly to make sure they were ok and didn’t have any un-aired needs. At our company we had lots of meetings and lots of conference calls, so I figured the bi-weekly cadence would cut down on the meeting load for my team at least a little.

If only my director has time to follow up our periodic, weekly 1:1 meetings. It is on my calendar, every Monday at 10:00 AM but I haven't had one in may be 3 months with an exceptional, ad-hoc touch base chat out of this scheduled time slot once every blue moon. Although, I am with the original poster of this question. I've been in IT trenches for longer than 30 years now and I really do not need to "touch base" with my supervisor. Just let me know what is needed and when it is needed, I will get it done. If I run into a administrative block, I know where my director lives and can reach out to him asking help to remove the mostly corporate politics induced blockade.

|| An hour is too long, just cut it short if you’ve got nothing to chat about.

A easy tip for this is to set every meeting to 30 mins but keep the next 30 mins free. Sometimes people worry that they did something wrong when a long meeting is cut short. Works for most meetings not just 1-1s.

Can you describe your bad vs good? I'm tussling with this right now and getting feedback can be difficult because of dynamics. Outsiders often have great feedback.