I’ve asked many teamleads why they have regular 1-1s.
By regular I mean set in the calendar to occur regularly.
Usual rationale is as follows:
- employees need time to bring and discuss problems they witnessed
- manager needs time to discuss problems
- employees need not to be afraid to discuss problems
- manager needs not to forget to provide feedback to employees
- provide feedback on employee’s growth
I’ll try to analyse each rationalisation attempt.
One cannot possibly argue that time is required to discuss a problem and come up with ways to solve it.
However, it’s important to focus on «when» the problem is discussed.
If 1-1 occurs every two weeks, the problem will have to wait from 1 till 13 days to be resolved.
Is this optimal? I doubt.
Usual counter-argument here is that «urgent» problems are resolved straight away while «other problems» wait.
This approach implies having whole team adopt good «triage» strategy for problems which allows everyone to properly separate problems based on their severity.
Triage demands possessing enough information to decide on problem’s category.
Do your developers know how to triage problems? Do they have enough information to triage problems?
If you recall the list of «can wait» problems, how many of them should have been resolved straight away?
If the amount of «can wait» problems is low, are you sure that having regular 1-1s for the reason of problem-solving is rational?
Managers are there to help teams resolve problems they can’t tackle on their own.
This context implies manager’s availability whenever a problem occurs. As problems can’t be forecasted, their discussion and resolving times can’t be predicted and added to calendar.
I’ve got bad news for the manager if employees are afraid to discuss problems outside of regular 1-1s. This means that the company has strong blaming culture.
I already made a topic about responsibility without guilt.
In this case regular 1-1s are more of a kludge rather than a solution to a deeply-rooted problem.
Having regular 1-1s as an palliative aid to this problem here means that the underlying cultural problem will keep affecting the sociotechnical system but will never be brought to light and resolved.
It seems to be obvious: no feedback — no improvement.
Employees should receive feedback for their results as soon as the results occur — if feedback is postponed, its value is almost null.
When result is not what was expected, you want next tasks to be done in a way that will yield results satisfying the expectations, so it’s clear the feedback should be given with no delay.
Hence, regular 1-1s certainly will help managers not to forget to provide feedback, but at wrong time.
It’s much more optimal to provide feedback right after any task which requires feedback is completed.
Traffic jams are a very good example of an effect of a system where bandwidth utilisation is maximised.
A system where employees do not have time for thinking or reflection is deeply flawed.
Similarly flawed is a system where employees need to postpone thinking on a problem till a regular 1-1 occurs.
This one seems quite reasonable as growth never happens quickly, so having regular meetings to sync on the progress seems quite rational.