One-on-ones over video

For years my best one-on-ones happened on the walk to get coffee. There’s a place about five minutes from the office, so ten minutes there and back plus the line, and something about walking next to someone instead of sitting across a table made people say things they wouldn’t say in a meeting room. I didn’t plan it that way. I noticed it after a couple of years, when I realized the coffee ones were the ones where I found out someone was thinking of leaving, or that two people on a team had stopped talking to each other.

We’ve been fully remote since March, so I’ve now done roughly six months of one-on-ones on video, something like 150 of them. Here’s what I’ve noticed, in no particular order.

The first month, I ran them exactly like before, just on Zoom, and they got worse in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. They were shorter, for one. Without the walk or the hallway, a 30-minute slot that used to start with five minutes of chat started on the first agenda item and ended early, and both of us were relieved. That felt efficient. It took me a while to see that the five minutes of nothing had been doing a lot of the work. It’s where you find out someone’s had a bad week before they’ve decided whether to tell you.

So now I open every one with some version of “how are you actually doing”, and I wait for the real answer, which sometimes takes a second try. In March and April that question got answers I’d never have heard in the office: a partner who’d lost their job, a parent in a hospital in another state, a kid who wouldn’t stop crying during school on Zoom. People are, oddly, more open from their kitchens than they were in a conference room. I think seeing each other’s homes did something. You can’t keep up a very professional front when your cat walks across the keyboard.

The thing that got genuinely worse is that I’ve lost the background signal. In the office I’d notice if someone was at their desk late every night, or eating lunch alone for a week, or had stopped joining the lunch-table arguments about tabs and spaces. None of that comes through Slack. So I’ve had to replace noticing with asking, which is clumsier, and I’m sure I’m missing things I would have caught before.

A few things I do differently now:

I don’t cancel them. I used to move one-on-ones around freely when something came up, and in person that was mostly harmless, because I’d see the person anyway. Remote, the one-on-one might be the only time that week they talk to me without anyone else on the call, so cancelling it means a week of silence. If I have to move one now, I move it within the same week.

I moved some of them to the phone. A couple of people on my team said they were sick of looking at a screen, so we switched to a phone call while we both go for a walk. It’s the closest thing to the coffee walk I’ve found, and it’s become my favorite slot of the week. Not everyone likes it, and it’s opt-in.

I turned off self-view.* Watching my own face for 30 minutes made me worse at listening, and once I noticed it I couldn’t stop noticing.

We keep a shared running doc for each person, with dated notes from every one-on-one and a section at the top for things either of us wants to bring up next time. I’d done this with some people before, but now it’s for everyone, because “I’ll remember” works worse when the conversations all blur into the same rectangle. It’s also where the career ladder conversations live, so a promotion discussion in December can point at notes from June.

And I do more skip-levels than I used to, short 20-minute ones with people who report to my managers, once a quarter. In the office I’d have heard a lot of what they tell me indirectly, by overhearing it. Now I don’t overhear anything.

The idea I took from the one-on-one section of The Manager’s Path, which I reviewed a few years ago, and from most of the managers I’ve respected, is that a one-on-one is mostly the other person’s meeting. That matters more now. It’s the one place in a remote week that’s built for them, so I try to talk less in it than I want to.

I don’t know how much of this survives going back to an office, whenever that is. I’d like to keep the phone walks.

* In Zoom it’s “Hide Self View”, when you right-click on your own video. It took me until July to find it.