Reengineering 1:1s for a new era of working

Estimated reading time: 31 minutes

The trusty 1:1 has been a key tool for engineering managers for decades, but in an era of AI, are they still fit for purpose?

Zeb Hermann is a rare species in tech management. His calendar isn’t overflowing with team meetings, instead the general manager of v0 at Vercel, the company behind Next.js, schedules precisely one team meeting each week, everything else is handled ad hoc. 

Hermann’s minimalist calendar was achieved by controversially scrapping one-on-one meetings with his reports, a decision driven by the belief that the management practices that worked in recent years are now holding back tech teams.

“This is the first company I’ve worked at [where] it was even on the table to consider a management approach that didn’t include even weekly one-on-ones,” Hermann said. “There are a bunch of things that you don’t question because they are the norm and it’s what everybody has seen everywhere else they’ve been.”

“Whether you worked at IBM, Intuit, or a small tech startup, everybody was doing one-on-ones,” he added.

A new way of working

It makes sense that one-on-ones are pervasive. Analysis from workforce analytics tool Worklytics found that the most engaged employees have an average of 3.5 one-on-one meetings per month, while the least engaged have only 2.2 per month. Managers who maintain 85% or higher on completed weekly one-on-ones demonstrate better retention outcomes. Google’s Project Oxygen study found that higher-scoring managers are more likely than lower-scoring managers to have frequent one-on-one meetings with their team members.

But work, especially in the technology industry, is rapidly changing. There’s a whole host of new workplace tools, often incorporating AI, which are changing how companies work. 

From Slack, encouraging asynchronous communication, to meeting assistants, such as ReadAI, SchedulerAI, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, that are designed to transform calendars company-wide with features such as handling pre-meeting scheduling, providing real-time meeting analysis, post-meeting coaching, and automated follow ups.

Calendly found that of 1,200 business leaders, 64% of Gen-Z and 59% of millennials were excited about smart scheduling assistants for productivity. These are also two demographics that are being most impacted with structural changes happening within work today as organizations flatten and managers – the majority of which are now millennials – grapple with burnout.

These shifts raise the question of whether it’s time to reengineer one-on-ones for a new era of work that is better-suited to the tools and the realities of being a manager today.

“There’s a lot of resistance to this,” Hermann said. “Many people’s reaction is, ‘oh my god, no. I’d be abandoning my people,’ or ‘I’ve always done it that way.’”

“Once you try it, it can be very liberating,” he said, giving managers back hours of time to focus on supporting the team then and there rather than waiting for the weekly one-to-one.

Eliminating one-on-ones doesn’t mean Hermann is removing individual conversations entirely. Async communication, quick Slack huddles, and project check-ins will cover status updates, while dedicated meetings for performance and career management can occur anywhere from once a month, to every six months or year depending on the employee or the organization’s performance review schedule, he said. 

A survey of around 2,000 knowledge workers in the US by AI meeting tool Miro found that 61% find working asynchronously reduces burnout, yet 64% of Gen-Z knowledge workers worry about annoying their co-workers with async questions.

Ismet Bekirov, CEO and co-founder of web development agency Greenice, also has performance management conversations at a similar cadence to Hermann after eliminating one-on-ones.

He observed frustration from employees with the repetition that came with regular one-on-ones, as well as passiveness towards the meetings as time went on. He scrapped them in favour of an approach used by Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, where direct reports can book time when they need it.

Like Huang, Ani Mishra, an engineering leader at Doordash who oversees roughly 25 people, puts the onus on his direct reports to own the calendar invite for one-on-ones. Most still book weekly, but some prefer to meet less frequently, he said.

“It’s not concerning for me that I’m not meeting with them regularly, but it’s very rare that somebody is doing really well and they do not want to meet their manager because it’s the main forum for the manager and them to align on what success means,” Mishra said.

Reengineering 1:1s

Aydin Mirzaee, CEO and co-founder of AI meeting assistant company Fellow, tried replacing one-on-ones with three-on-ones, a format that worked well with his two co-founders.

“I have this rule that I don’t want more than fifteen hours of meetings a week on a personal basis – so that includes any external calls, internal calls – and that’s a number that I have to actively manage,” Mirzaee said. “If I’m not careful, it easily balloons to twenty.”

Testing out three-on-ones came from the recognition that he was often discussing the same topics with various senior executives across his one-on-ones. 

“What ended up happening was there was a lot of the conversation that wasn’t relevant to the other person,” Mirzaee said. “Then I would find that the other person would zone out and then I would find that it almost became my job to orchestrate and make sure to have topics that are relevant to both.”

Mirzaee reverted back to one-on-ones with his senior leadership team and continues to do three-on-ones with his co-founders. The difference? The overlap between himself and the co-founders makes it worthwhile.

“Theoretically, if I had a three-on-one with my head of product and my head of sales, that would just be a very bad choice because there’s little overlap,” he said. “You end up almost wasting the time of the other person, especially in a day and age of AI where you can now grab clips or summaries.”

In addition to using features, like summarization, from AI meeting tools to tackle the challenges of the repetition of topics across one-on-ones, Mirzaee has also restructured his one-on-ones to take place on Mondays and then have wider group meetings on Tuesdays. This gives him the chance to tell executives to “park” ideas to discuss as a group.

David Shim, CEO and co-founder of AI meeting assistant Read AI, has observed, over a 30-day period, that Mondays are the best day for high engagement in one-on-one meetings based on insights from the entire Read AI customer base. Read AI’s meeting tool tracks and advises on the engagement and sentiment of meetings. He also argues that managers shouldn’t completely eliminate one-on-ones because they have a 17% higher engagement score than all other meeting types based on those customer insights.

“People want them, but they don’t necessarily want a lot of them,” Shim said. “And they don’t necessarily need to be very long and there’s a lot of opportunity to make them more efficient.”

One way meetings are being made more efficient is leaning on the recommendations made by AI via these meeting tools such as the suggestion of changing the frequency of a meeting or its day/time. 

“The beauty of AI is you can’t get offended,” Shim said. “AI is gonna go and [recommend] , ‘You talk too much,’ and you’re like, ‘Well, really?’ And then you look at the data and you’re like, ‘I did talk 95% of the time, I should actually correct myself on this.’”

Shifting the administrative burden

Meetings are also being shortened through the use of AI from generating agendas to highlighting follow up items and providing summaries of status updates from other meetings across the organization. However these features should be treated with caution, a recent Wall Street Journal report highlights how AI has misinterpreted business owners’ conversations as well as summarized private conversations.

A lot of hesitation around one-on-ones comes from feeling like it’s another administrative task, said Shonna Waters, workplace researcher and CEO of advisory firm Fractional Insights. This is a problem as managers already feel they are spending around 40% of their time either firefighting or handling administrative tasks, according to a 2025 Deloitte report.

“People have more meetings. They are doing two or three full-time employee’s worth of jobs at one time, and then sometimes they feel like,’ oh, gosh, this is another meeting on top of all these other meetings,’ if it’s not used well,” said Kyle Elliott, a Silicon Valley career coach. 

Technology could handle many of the administrative elements enabling managers to focus on the human element of the meeting, Waters said. Research shows people are generally comfortable with AI handling administrative tasks, but overwhelming people prefer human managers for motivation and recognition, she said, noting the importance of enabling team members to opt of using AI in these settings.

“Sometimes one-on-ones are these sacred spaces for them to be open and honest and if they’re being recorded or transcribed, they can feel like they no longer have that space to be transparent and open and honest about how they’re feeling,” Elliott said. Doordash’s Mishra echoes this sentiment, noting that he finds people are less frank when meeting remotely due to surveillance fears and that he gets a better sense of how they are doing when in person.

This fear is heightened because the technology industry feels less safe, Elliott said. At Fractional Insights they have an angst index that tracks work-related angst. About 44% of employees are experiencing work-related angst, Waters said, and this trends slightly higher for the technology industry. Waters notes one-on-ones, with transparent communication, can be one way to reduce angst.

“The best thing to do is actually lean into the relationships because you still need people to perform,” Waters said. “You still need them to show up and you don’t want them to be distracted by this negative storytelling that they’re doing in the absence of information.”

Mishra views one-on-ones as the highest quality conversations he has during his week and believes this will become increasingly important as AI is further integrated into our personal and working lives.

“This is like one thing which is very human in our jobs – to be able to connect with others and I have historically gained so many insights, not [only] as a manager, also, in the past, as an IC and even today talking to my manager,” he said.

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