2019 State of One-on-ones Report - How over 200 managers approach 1:1 meetings 💬

Loved this report! I was really surprised to see that 54% of managers said that one of their goals for their one-on-ones was to have status update chats with their direct reports. There's a time and place for that and, at least for me, it's definitely not during a one-on-one.

Are you having one-on-ones with your direct reports?

Quality, thoughtful report. Definitely worth a read for managers, but also for independent contributors who want improve their 1:1s with their boss.

Interesting to see that what managers report most as the purpose of their role (keep team on track and aligned to goals) is pretty much what they report spending the least time on in their 1:1’s (alignment to company mission). Looking at the options for how time is spent you can see it’s possible respondents included their work on keeping team on track as part of another category, but even if you account for some variation there this is still a striking difference!

As a software developer who’s worked at both large and smaller companies, and having had managers with a range of different styles, I was surprised that a lot of the stats about 1:1 focus are fairly consistent between companies of various sizes, and managers of different levels of experience. But the differences in technologies certainly ring true for me. The one big company I’ve worked at, managers would almost always communicate with me by email or maybe internal Skype, and when I left they were just beginning to shift towards other tools (in their case MS Teams). That seems to be the sense I’ve gotten talking with friends at other big companies too. So perhaps that big email percentage will start to shift downwards fairly soon? Overall, I’m really happy to see this report come out, and as a fellow SoapBoxer I’m very impressed with all the work our team did to collect all this data and present it so well!