What Breaks the Camel’s Back: Part 2
1:1 Meetings
THE SITUATION: One-on-One Meetings (1:1’s)
A manager joins a new team where they have 20 direct reports. The norm in the company is that you have one-on-one (1:1) meetings with all your employees regularly. So the manager sets up 10 meetings per week for 1 hour each. They meet with each employee once every two weeks. That’s a staggering 10 hours of 1:1’s per week. As a result, the manager ends up working countless (unpaid) overtime hours getting their actual work done because they don’t have enough time in the week.
THE PROBLEMS
BURNOUT
Microsoft’s September 2022 Work Trend Index — a global survey of workers across industries and companies — found that more than half of managers (53%) report feeling burned out at work. One of the key contributors was high workloads. When managers have hours of 1:1 meetings every week, then they often don’t have enough time to do their actual work. They end up working long hours (away from their families and loved ones) on weekends to compensate. It’s not sustainable.
“53% of managers report that they’re already burned out at work”
BOTTLENECKS
1:1’s often become the place where employees give the manager updates on their work. They tell the manager what’s happening and maybe where they need help. The manager tells them what they should or shouldn’t be doing. This teaches employees that they should go to the manager when they need help instead of leaning on their teammates (who also might be working the same projects). It often means that people will stop work and save their help needs for a 1:1 that may be days away. The manager becomes a bottleneck clogged full of questions needing to be asked, updates to be shared, and decisions to be made. This reinforces the toxic narrative of “manager as superhero”.
EXCLUSION
1:1’s often become the place where managers share and discuss flowdown. In this instance, that’s 20 meetings where the same flowdown is being shared in 20 different ways with different questions and resulting conversations. When employees get different stories from the same manager, it can create an environment where people feel left out and not in the “know”. On top of that, sharing flowdown in 1:1’s is an inefficient use of time when it could be shared asynchronously with the whole team at once.
THE SOLUTIONS
You’re probably wondering what an alternative to 1:1’s might look like. I’ve got you! If you’re willing to experiment, then you’ll soon find that your calendar is opening up for more time working on what’s most important to you.
Experiments to Try:
Default to no 1:1 meetings. Yes, this is actually an option! Employees are responsible for scheduling any one-off 1:1’s as needed. 1:1’s should be reserved for new teammate onboarding, development discussions, personnel issues, etc.
Avoid using 1:1’s for flow down, project updates, or decisions that impact more than the two people having the discussion.Flowdown should be communicated asynchronously whenever possible. As I outlined in Part 1 regarding staff meetings, share flowdown in a way that cuts back on the time needed to share the information. Any follow-on discussion should take place out in the open with the whole team (email, persistent chat, staff meeting, etc.). This will boost inclusion and transparency while saving a ton of time.
Default to transparency. Project updates, help needs, and work in general should be shared out in the open via persistent chat, email, or in staff meetings. When you do these things in the open for everyone to see, then you have a better chance of leveraging the collective experiences and perspectives of the entire team. This means you will make better decisions, anticipate more roadblocks, and free up precious time (for the manager) to do their most important work.
Ruthlessly eliminate unnecessary meetings from your calendar, especially recurring meetings that have no specific purpose or that you keep rescheduling. Trust that if it’s important, you’ll make time for it.
Consider experimenting with an Action Meeting (which I recommended to replace staff meetings in Part 1 of this series. Its purpose is to align on, unblock, and move work forward. The Action Meeting provides a natural and structured way to provide project updates while also ensuring there is a forum for teammates to ask questions, propose experiments, ask for help, etc.
It takes repetition to get comfortable using this structure, but done right, it’s one of the most powerful tools for keeping a team aligned. Sam Spurlin of The Ready does a great job outlining how and why to conduct an Action Meeting in this post.
If you’d like a free and concise Action Meeting How-To resource, send an email to rory@thewayswework.com.
Happy experimenting, and as always, The Ways We Work is here to help.
