Why do teams hold one-on-ones?

Reason 1. You can keep goals and expectations aligned

There are four main reasons to hold one-on-ones: aligning goals and expectations, raising engagement, spotting exit signals early, and supporting growth. The first is goals and expectations. A performance review held once a year cannot keep up with goals and expectations that change during the year. Harvard Business Review describes managers' goals for one-on-ones as aligning on expectations and building trust with team members (HBR, 2024).

Adobe dropped its annual review and stack ranking in favor of "Check-in" conversations held every quarter between managers and employees. Some managers fold these into weekly or monthly one-on-ones (Chief Learning Officer, 2014).

Reason 2. The leader is the biggest influence on engagement

Even with aligned goals, work rarely turns into results if the team member is not engaged, and managers have a large influence on engagement. Gallup estimated that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units (Gallup, 2015). Another Gallup analysis found that employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them were almost three times as likely to be engaged as employees whose managers do not (Gallup, 2015).

Both results are correlations, so they should not be read as "holding one-on-ones triples engagement." Still, the manager's influence is large and regular communication tends to go together with engagement, which is reason enough to start.

Reason 3. You can spot exit signals earlier

When low engagement lasts, it can end in a resignation. According to Gallup, 52% of employees who left voluntarily said their manager or organization could have done something to keep them. And 51% said that in the three months before they left, neither their manager nor any other leader spoke with them about their job satisfaction or their future with the organization (Gallup, 2019).

A regular one-to-one conversation is a natural place to ask those questions. It gives you a chance to hear signals about workload, career concerns, and working relationships before someone hands in notice.

Reason 4. It creates a place for coaching and development

Finally, a one-on-one is a place to support growth. In Project Oxygen, Google identified ten behaviors of effective managers; the first is "Be a good coach" and the sixth is "Support career development and discuss performance." The research analyzed more than 10,000 data points from performance reviews and feedback surveys (Google re:Work, 2025).

Google did not call these behaviors one-on-ones. But coaching and career conversations happen most naturally when there is a set time to sit down one-to-one.

When one-on-ones fail to work

Even with reasons this clear, many organizations adopt one-on-ones and still feel they do not work. Orblit groups the core causes of failed adoption into four (STIC).

• Skill: people do not know what to ask or how.
• Time: preparation and note-taking push the meetings back.
• Information: it is hard to know the team member's situation and what was said last time.
• Continuous management: commitments from the conversation are not tracked and do not carry into the next one.

Whether one-on-ones work depends less on how many you hold than on whether each conversation carries into the next. Make last time's commitments the first topic of the next one-on-one, and check briefly with each other at the end whether it helped. Whether they have become a formality shows up first in these two things.

A researcher writing in Harvard Business Review points out that few organizations give managers strong guidance or training on meeting individually with their employees (HBR, 2022). Skill has to be built through training and practice, but the burden of time, information, and continuous management can be eased with tools. That is why Orblit has AI help with preparation, records, summaries, and follow-through. Learn more at Orblit 1on1.