To be fair, I do still think it's worth showing up to the meeting even if you think there's nothing to be said beforehand, since sometimes breaking out of the routine gives you the opening you need to get something off your chest. Sometimes it's possible to get overly caught up in the flow, which can be useful for solving the immediate problem, but might hide other stuff that hasn't been given room to breathe. Meetings like 1on1s and retrospectives are opportunities to take that break.
I don't need to "get something off my chest" every week, most people don't.
There is of course value to communication, but managers without better things to do are trying to have it far too frequently. It is also much easier to schedule meetings as needed and keep the frequency of the regularly scheduled ones on as long a period as possible.
I do know how easy it is to get in the zone as a developer, and subsequently feel frustrated that a useless meeting just popped up in the middle of your flow, but that's not a good reason to write off 1on1s entirely. Worst case your flow will be interrupted once a week. Two if your team has a weekly retrospective as well. If two interruptions per week is significantly damaging your productivity, something is wrong.
Personally, I am not a fan of meetings in general, and I do consider many of them to be useless. But 1on1s and retrospectives are the two that I mandate in the teams that I lead - one is for the health of my reports, and the other is for the health of the team. All other meetings can and should be optional. If someone is feeling snowed under by all the other meetings, then it's exactly during the 1on1 or retro when those feelings can be shared. If you don't have those meetings, then you're relying on everyone on the team to always speak up whenever they need help, and while that might work for certain, very assertive and/or self-centered employees, it doesn't work for everyone. For that reason I think it's important to schedule these times in deliberately to give people the opportunity to express themselves.
When there isn't a culture of open communication - which is established through regular meetings of this sort - many employees find it difficult to be honest about their challenges and difficulties (on the negative side) or goals and aspirations (on the positive side). In either case I believe it improves productivity and retention to give employees dedicated space to talk about that stuff.
If I have a standup at 10am every day, this guarantees that I'm not going to ever get anything substantial done before 10am. A 3pm weekly meeting can mostly destroy my ability to get in to deep work for that afternoon.
I don't "schedule" deep work, it is a thing that happens as a combination of what needs to be done, the time available, minor tasks, and interruptions.
Daily and weekly meetings significantly reduce the surface area available for these things to happen, and often serve as a source of boredom and frustration, being in a room with people who obviously don't have anything to say, saying words because they're supposed to.
The whole point of 1on1s and retrospectives is to optimize your work. If you literally only have these two meetings per week and you still find that unreasonably disruptive, then you could discuss dropping them to once a fortnight. If you still find those two meetings per fortnight unreasonably disruptive, and you really get absolutely zero benefit from them whatsoever, perhaps you should be working as an independent contractor and not a salaried employeee with a team of colleagues and a manager.
I do understand where you're coming from. I have had several direct reports who never had anything at all to say in their 1on1s, who had no interest in setting goals, no interest in advancing in the company, no interest in improving their workflow, who honestly just wanted to sit down, do the work, get paid, go home. That's fine, and it's useful to have some people on the team who want to work that way, but they really are a minority of people I have worked with in "normal" company environments. To be frank, I would prefer to work that way myself, but that's not really how most companies operate, because most companies are geared for growth, so it's not enough to just stay at the same level of productivity forever. The goal for most companies is to continuously improve and increase their output, forever. This is why most companies see value in having these meetings, because they are a way to focus employees on becoming ever more productive.
That escalated quickly.
Good points, though you're talking past each other a bit. (I'm not disagreeing about 121s' value nor flow's unschedulability.)
You should try it!
There is value too in scheduling a 1on1 that is easy to cancel. It's easy enough to quickly check if it's necessary, if it isn't, no worries.
To make sure IC's remember managers have power. That's all there is to it. No real useful stuff gets done.
At the end of the day it's just two colleagues in a room, if you can't get anything done with that, there's either nothing to get done or you couldn't get it done.
Sometimes, often even, there just isn't anything
that needs to be said. I feel the same way about
standups and 1:1s.
Meetings should be treated like investments: by
spending the time of the participants, are you
going to reap the rewards of time saved in the future?
Let's assume a 40-hour work week. (lol, I know)
Daily standups should be <= 15 minutes. Let's also suppose we're doing biweekly 30 minute 1:1s.
That's 1.25 hours per week, combined. Of course the real productivity loss of a meeting can be greater if it pulls you out of a "flow" state. Let's assume some of these rituals also incur a "flow state interruption" penalty of 30 additional minutes of lost productivity. So the total productivity cost is 2-3 hours per week per team member, or roughly 6% of their theoretical productive time.
I think this is a reasonable overhead. Working on a team requires communication. This seems like an efficient way to do it.
What's the alternative? Communicate whenever you feel like it? That's extremely iffy to put it mildly even if everybody on the team is an amazing communicator, which is an extremely unlikely ideal state of affairs. Adding a little structure makes sure the communication actually happens.
This really cuts to the point of what I’m trying to express. The general model of meetings is that they are there for exchanging information. One issue with this is something you’ve pointed out, that people feel compelled keep the meeting but there’s no information to share. So there’s just nothing.
There’s a second issue. There are things you can do through talking with another person that aren’t just sharing information. If you only see meetings as a way for information to change hands, you can’t see these options. I find it hard to put into words, but I’ll try to give some examples.
You could change how you feel about something by talking about it. A concern that is too scary to fully think about could be spoken about so you can face it. There’s value in talking about it that’s separate from the information sharing or even the problem solving.
You could generate ideas. One person creates space and the other fills it by coming up with new ideas.
You could understand something better by explaining it (see Duck, Rubber).
You could set an intention. Having the memory of telling someone you’ll do something may make you more likely to do it (separate from them holding you accountable).
You could practice what you’ll say in some other situation. Maybe one sided practice, maybe role play.
All of these are a sort of “talking as doing”. It’s a very different gear from “talking as information sharing”. I’ve found it can be really hard to get people to change those gears. It’s odd. It’s not like they’re directly resistant, they just seem unaware. It’s like someone holding their lunch in a park wondering where we’re going to eat. Here! Go ahead! I don’t want to hear about you being alive, I want to see it!
I don't need daily group therapy with my team or weekly individual therapy with my manager.
There's not that much to say, I can't invent that much to say, people rarely need that much communication.
I don't need to brainstorm ideas daily/weekly, don't need to set intentions. I often know what needs to be done for long stretches and am more than capable of communicating it ad hoc when it is most useful to communicate it. We have at our disposal half a dozen forms of communication, forced regular meetings can be the worst kind.
Look, I don't care if you do one on ones, standups, whatever. No need to tell me you don't need them. I don't even know you. I'm just trying to share some ideas with you and anyone reading.
What's not fine is being forced to do them, unable to exit the waste of time.
Meetings should be treated like investments: by spending the time of the participants, are you going to reap the rewards of time saved in the future?
Sometimes there is information that does need to change hands, often there just isn't, and meetings take away considerably more time than they take by breaking people out of work that isn't always easy to pick right back up.
Meetings are often just babysitting for managers, keeping them entertained and engaged when they don't have anything better to do (or preventing them from doing the things they need to be doing necessitating hiring more managers who make more meetings and result in less time available per person)
So many standups and 1:1s I've been in have just been an exercise in all parties thinking of something to say because it is presumed stuff needs to be said.