[spadros]

Yeah, I’ve been finding my one on ones useless recently, and this article seems to have some more useless “wisdom” here summed up in a nice package. Kind of annoying to me that the writer implies the one on one is for me to fill his valuable time. I’m loving my work, don’t have any issues with my coworkers, and like my current position. I really don’t have critical feedback to bring to the table every one on one. To be honest, if everything is going smoothly, all I can do is talk about what I’m excited to work on next and how life is going. Which is a status update.

By the way, I found the “figure out my problems and solve them” line very rich. Every morning we have a standup where my manager tells me what his main concerns are and then I change my priority of work to keep his stress (and thus mine) low on whatever the new issue is. That’s generally how managers and employees work. You’re probably doing something very wrong or are very green if you don’t know what your managers chief stressors and concerns are, because I have no idea how you’d manage your work properly otherwise.

[hurflmurfl]

When I don't have anything work-related to report, there are no concerns on either side, and there are no situational changes, we just chat with my manager for the whole half-hour about various life topics.

Sometimes it may bring to memory something related to work, which we can discuss. Sometimes it will be completely unrelated to work for the whole meeting, but I think there is still value in that. It helps us build a better relationship and reveals more about who we are and how we think and helps just generally "tune" ourselves to each other.

[XorNot]

I hate when this happens. It's been a recent revelation of mine that I'm happiest when my personal business remains personal. I hate having to scrape through my life sanitizing topics into conversational safe spaces just to get paid.

[andruby]

I personally like talking about life-stuff with certain people, but not with all. In practice there's a handful of people where we do share those things, and a bunch where we don't.

And imo that's totally fine.

We usually start 1:1's with a little smalltalk, then list the agenda points that both participants have prepared. We cover those, and if there's time left we either talk about life, freestyle into broad work topics or end the meeting early.

There are times when I feel like a meeting wasn't valuable, but by far most are valuable. Especially in a fully remote team (even pre-covid), it is a moment to talk and get to know one another (again, only if both parties want to)

[gburdell3]

You're not a work robot, you're a human being with a life. It's only natural for people to want to discuss their lives with each other. It's hilarious when people on this forum complain about being treated as "faceless worker drones" and then leave comments like this.

[tchalla]

You can talk about life topics which are professional in nature. You keep your personal out of it.

[PenguinCoder]

Very much agreed. Those personal anecdotes and stories shouldn't have any affect on the workplace. But often you'll find subtle biases coming from the other party, after sharing stuff they may not like or agree with. It's fine for everyone to have their own opinion and certainly feelings on things. I don't want to share anything personal, or not work related at any work function/meeting. I don't want someone else's opinion on my personal life affecting their opinions of my work.

[alexashka]

It is unfortunate, innit?

That's just how it goes with most people - you have to adjust yourself, almost the way you do with children.

[sdoering]

> You’re probably doing something very wrong or are very green if you don’t know what your managers chief stressors and concerns are, because I have no idea how you’d manage your work properly otherwise.

I basically agree with nearly everything you said. I just wanted to widen the scope a bit on the quoted part. Working in an agency in a client facing role, my main focus is to reduce the stressors for my client and "arm" them with things that make them look good with their managers and leadership.

Else than that I can only agree that when everything is fine - why should I fill 30 - 45 minutes of my managers time (that could be used more efficiently).

Also: If not everything is well I feel it is important to see if this is something your manager can do anything about. Not because you should not tell them if they can't do anything about, but to adjust your expectations and state it as an information/request. Oftentimes I found myself talking to my manager about things that don't work well but they could not do anything about this. But we found ourselves nonetheless creating ideas how to mitigate this in other areas.

[adolph]

> I’ve been finding my one on ones useless recently

It sounds like you have a good problem to have. Given your described state you have space for relationship building. Many humans enjoy different kinds of chitchat. If one is able to create a positive expected emotional outcome from interactions, it acts as a thumb on the scales in your favor in other areas.

Cialdini's book "Pre-suasion" has good information about different techniques to operationalize. Below is a podcast in which he discusses the ethical use of such.

https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/robert-cialdini/

[wldcordeiro]

Additionally I have seen multiple articles or heard managers talk about having an open document between themselves and the report that they "own" and can fill up with stuff and as an IC/report I just don't see where I'm supposed to find the time to do all that and additionally as the team manager who is responsible for reporting up what we're doing/etc why don't you do more tracking of my accomplishments/etc too? You're literally reporting up on those accomplishments to higher managers so why can't you also collate that info for me to present in 1:1s?

[ramraj07]

Generally agreed, but I’d say it’s easy to forget long standing issues because you mentioned it once and no one followed up. It’s a good idea to keep 1-1 meeting notes to follow up on things and keep a record. And honestly if people have nothing much to discuss or are not interested in chitchat you should just wrap the check in early and let everyone get back to work or life.