[jcims]

I have 30 minute 1:1’s every week with my team (8 engineers). I’m in weekly backlog grooming sessions, semi-weekly demos, retros and sprint planning and of course daily standups. I’m in weekly status calls with two separate customers and weekly prioritization calls with product. I’m in constant dozer mode trying to clear a path for my team to eliminate blockers, execute bullshit corp process and help them resolve issues hands-on. I have a team member in my ear 80% of the week and half of them still prefer to regurgitate status than have any kind of other conversation.

At times I’ll interrupt them and say ’this isnt a status call, this is your time to complain, vent, suggest, ask whatever you like and find a way for me to help you’. I always try to keep them upbeat and ask about the weekend, hobbies, etc. Not everybody wants that conversation i think.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[saila]

Have you tried building trust? The tone of your comment here makes me think you haven’t. If you build trust with people, they’ll just tell you things. If you just say they can tell you things, no rational employee will believe that. And pushing people to talk about their weekend or other aspects of their personal life is downright toxic IMO. Again, if you build trust and rapport, you won’t have to ask these rote, off-the-shelf questions that can put people into a wary state of mind.

[jcims]

Trust is the centerpiece of my job, I’m certain that I’m not perfect but it’s something I can use to contextualize every decision and steer towards the best answer.

I’m sure my words could evoke a notion of some bully creeping on employees but I am just trying to break habits. I don’t force anything and as others have mentioned sometimes a status update is exactly what folks want to discuss.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

+1. I'm certainly not keen on sharing anything personal with a manager. we're not friends. I'm not going to tell you how i got drunk and puked or whatever, that's not appropriate and it's not doing me any favors career wise.

[danparsonson]

I would venture to suggest that they give you status updates instead of what you're really looking for because you have these meetings every week - how much is happening in the space of four and a half days since the last 1:1 that they can't deal with themselves or raise in the stand ups? Probably not a lot. And if you're looking for complaints, suggestions, etc., in 1:1s, then what are the retrospectives for? A former manager once asked me how frequently I wanted to have 1:1s with him, and my reply was never, but he insisted so I offered once a month and we ended up doing it fortnightly. I never felt like it was helpful.

Not to mention that as engineers, they probably value extended blocks of uninterrupted time to focus on being productive;

> 30 minute 1:1’s every week with my team (8 engineers). I’m in weekly backlog grooming sessions, semi-weekly demos, retros and sprint planning and of course daily standups

With respect, this sounds like hell to me. The only thing I would be complaining about is that you were tying me up in meetings so much that I couldn't get any actual work done.

And however friendly you are with your team members, you're still their manager and they probably don't feel close enough to freely share much of their personal lives with you - that's generally the nature of the relationship and there's nothing wrong with that.

[hef19898]

In 1:1s with my managers I was always happy to get the undivided attention of my manager to discuss status updates.

[jcims]

That’s 100% perfectly fine for me as well if we’re starting from a baseline of you talking about what’s important to you. It’s unfortunate that we have to ration time like this but it ensures that folks who normally wouldn’t initiate a conversation have one initiated for them.