Hi ProductHunters 👋 I am so excited to share our 2019 State of One-on-ones report with you! It has taken 4 months, 3 designers, 2 marketers, 1 developer and a whole slew of amazing managers 🎉 to make this happen. Back in August, we surveyed over 200 managers on how they run one-on-one meetings. Our goal: To learn how managers are spending this invaluable time with their team. What are their biggest challenges? What's on the agenda? How often are one-on-one meetings? What tools are being used to facilitate the meeting? The results were, to say the least, interesting. Here are few of my key takeaways from the report: ⚡️Remote managers find retention 6x more challenging than on-site managers ⚡️75% of managers are talking about growth and development in their 1:1s ⚡️The topic managers discuss least in 1:1s is “alignment to company mission” ⚡️75% of respondents use Slack as their primary communication tool with their teams ➡️My ask: What is shocking to you? What, if anything, has made you think twice about your approach to one-on-ones? What stats would you have love to seen in this report? And if you find the information useful and interesting, please give us a vote 👍 and share your comments below! We’d love, love to hear your feedback 😊

Love this! Great to get insights into the way other managers operate with their teams.

Looking forward to reading this one!

Beautifully designed report, SoapBox team! I’d be curious to see the differences and similarities between direct reports and their managers. Do they think they’re having the same discussions? Are they aligned on what the goal of the meeting is? The most shocking stat to me is that remote managers experience retention challenges 6x more than onsite managers... That’s crazy!

As an HR professional, I'm pretty surprised that alignment to the company mission isn't discussed more within one-on-one meetings. I feel like that's a super important conversation to have and one-on-ones are a perfect opportunity to do just that. Great job on this SoapBox!

wow gorgeous design. definitely going to take a note and read this 😻

I have always struggled with the value of 1:1 meetings but reading through this has helped me see the true value of them. Keep the awesome content coming!

The stat that surprised me most was that engineering managers spend the most time in meetings all week. Definitely thought it would have been sales considering all of the prospect and customer meetings they would normally have. Great job on the report SoapBox team!

This looks so good!!! Love the dynamic landing page with all it's moving parts. Not related to the stats, but love all of the quotes you included from remote managers. Especially the one from Kara McNair at Buffer on the importance of spending time to learn about what your direct reports need: "Building a relationship. I want my direct reports to really understand that my job is to help them be successful and to meet their own goals and dreams. By spending time learning about what matters to them and showing them that I really care about that, they trust me enough to tell me when things aren’t going well for them and giving me the chance to help them."

Super excited to finally get this out! So, so many interesting stats. On top of that, we've included some great quotes from even better people leaders. Including @i_am_brennan, @domkent, @tomhadfield, @jamesrcarr, @paulg and more! The stat that surprised me most was that, before this report, I really believed that managers who worked in tech vs. those who didn't would have faced different challenges, had different priorities and approached one-on-ones differently too. What surprised me most was that there wasn't much difference between the two.

Loved this report! I was really surprised to see that 54% of managers said that one of their goals for their one-on-ones was to have status update chats with their direct reports. There's a time and place for that and, at least for me, it's definitely not during a one-on-one.

Are you having one-on-ones with your direct reports?

Quality, thoughtful report. Definitely worth a read for managers, but also for independent contributors who want improve their 1:1s with their boss.

Interesting to see that what managers report most as the purpose of their role (keep team on track and aligned to goals) is pretty much what they report spending the least time on in their 1:1’s (alignment to company mission). Looking at the options for how time is spent you can see it’s possible respondents included their work on keeping team on track as part of another category, but even if you account for some variation there this is still a striking difference!

As a software developer who’s worked at both large and smaller companies, and having had managers with a range of different styles, I was surprised that a lot of the stats about 1:1 focus are fairly consistent between companies of various sizes, and managers of different levels of experience. But the differences in technologies certainly ring true for me. The one big company I’ve worked at, managers would almost always communicate with me by email or maybe internal Skype, and when I left they were just beginning to shift towards other tools (in their case MS Teams). That seems to be the sense I’ve gotten talking with friends at other big companies too. So perhaps that big email percentage will start to shift downwards fairly soon? Overall, I’m really happy to see this report come out, and as a fellow SoapBoxer I’m very impressed with all the work our team did to collect all this data and present it so well!