Key takeaways

  • A one-on-one is the employee's meeting: they bring the topics, the manager listens, coaches and removes obstacles.
  • Keep it short and regular. Fifteen to thirty minutes every week or two works better than a long, rare meeting.
  • Cover what makes feedback meaningful (recognition, collaboration, goals and priorities, strengths), then write down the next steps you both agreed.
  • Open every meeting with the action items from the last one.

The template

Copy it from the page or download the Word file. Free to use and adapt; no sign-up.

Download the Word fileDOCX · 3 KB

One-on-one meeting template

Meeting details

  • Employee:
  • Manager:
  • Date:
  • Next meeting:

1. Check-in (2 minutes)

  • How are you doing this week, at work and outside it, as much as you want to share?

2. Follow-up on last time (3 minutes)

  • Action items from our last one-on-one, and where each one stands:

3. Employee's topics (10 minutes)

  • What do you want to talk about today?
  • What is going well that I should know about?
  • Where are you blocked, and what would help?

4. Priorities and goals (5 minutes)

  • What are your top priorities until we meet again?
  • Is anything competing for your time that we should drop or postpone?

5. Feedback, both ways (5 minutes)

  • One thing that went well since our last meeting, and why:
  • One thing to do differently next time:
  • What should I, as your manager, start, stop or continue doing?

6. Growth (once a month)

  • Which skill or experience do you want to build this quarter?
  • What opportunity, project or person could help?

7. Next steps

  • Action item, owner and due date:
  • Action item, owner and due date:

How to use it

Share the template with your team member a day before the meeting and let them fill in their topics first. The order matters: their agenda comes before yours, and the follow-up on last time comes before anything new. If you run one-on-ones in performance management software, you can keep the same sections as a shared agenda so notes and next steps carry over from one meeting to the next.

Keep the meetings frequent rather than long. Gallup reports that 15 to 30 minutes is enough for a meaningful conversation if it happens often, and that regular conversations of that length have a greater impact than 30- to 60-minute ones. Gallup's chairman recommends one meaningful coaching conversation per week with each team member, in person or remotely.

Why regular one-on-ones matter

Gallup found that employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged as employees whose managers do not. Employees who strongly agree they have talked with their manager about their goals and successes in the past six months are 2.8 times more likely to be engaged.

Frequency is not everything, though. A 2022 doctoral study at UNC Charlotte with 303 participants found that the quality of one-on-ones, especially how much the manager focuses on the relationship, mattered more for engagement than how many meetings took place, as long as they happened at least monthly. That is why the template gives most of the time to the employee's own topics.

What to talk about

Gallup finds that feedback is meaningful to employees when the manager focuses on recognition, collaboration, goals and priorities, and strengths. The template's sections make room for each of them:

  • Recognition: name one specific thing that went well and why it mattered.
  • Collaboration: ask who they need help from and where work is getting stuck between people.
  • Goals and priorities: confirm what matters most until the next meeting, and what can wait.
  • Strengths: look for the work that energizes them and how to give them more of it.

Common mistakes

  • Turning it into a status meeting. Project updates belong in the team's tools; use this time for the person.
  • Canceling first. Moving a one-on-one is fine; canceling it repeatedly tells people they come last.
  • Talking more than listening. If you speak for more than half the meeting, the agenda has become yours.
  • No written next steps. Without them, the same topics come back every time.

Free checklist

Buyer's checklist: Performance Management Software

Everything to check before you sign with a performance management provider, on one printable page.

  • 9 questions to ask every vendor, with how to verify each answer
  • 10 capabilities to confirm in a demo
  • 5 pricing questions about fees outside the quote
  • A scorecard of the 5 products we rank highest, with what we verified

Facts as of Oct 21, 2026 · LeadChange Research Team

What it checks

  1. Review cycle configuration
  2. Goal management and OKR tracking
  3. Continuous feedback and check-ins
  4. 360 and multi-rater feedback
  5. Calibration tools
  6. Audit trail and record retention
  7. Integration with HRIS and compensation
  8. Manager experience

and 1 more question in the full checklist

Sample question

Review cycle configuration

Ask to configure two cycles with different forms and dates in the demo.

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Your checklist

Next: see the products that fit your team, ranked without regard to who pays us.

Frequently asked questions

How do you structure a 1 on 1 meeting?

Use the same order every time: a short check-in, follow-up on last meeting's next steps, the employee's own topics first, priorities and goals, feedback in both directions, growth once a month, and written next steps with an owner and a date. The template above gives each part a time budget, so the meeting stays short.

How long should a one-on-one meeting be?

Short and frequent beats long and rare. Gallup reports that 15 to 30 minutes is enough for a meaningful conversation if it happens regularly, and that regular 15- to 30-minute conversations have a greater impact than 30- to 60-minute ones.

How often should managers hold one-on-ones?

Weekly is the common recommendation: Gallup's chairman advises one meaningful coaching conversation per week with each team member. Research from UNC Charlotte found that meeting quality mattered more for engagement than frequency, as long as the meetings happen at least monthly.

What should you talk about in a one-on-one?

Start with what the employee wants to discuss, then cover priorities, obstacles, feedback both ways and development. Gallup finds feedback is meaningful to employees when the manager focuses on recognition, collaboration, goals and priorities, and strengths.

Is there a one-on-one meeting template in Word?

Yes. This page offers the template as a free Word file with no sign-up, and the same agenda is shown above so you can copy it into any document or notes tool.

Do one-on-one meetings improve engagement?

Gallup found that employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged, and those who have talked with their manager about goals and successes in the past six months are 2.8 times more likely to be engaged. Quality counts more than count: a 2022 study found that how one-on-ones are run mattered more for engagement than how many are held.

Related reading

Sources

The 5 pages this page's facts come from, with the day we last checked each one.

Quotes from the sources
  1. Gallup Employees Want a Lot More From Their Managers (Jim Harter and Amy Adkins)“employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged as employees whose managers do not hold regular meetings with them.”
  2. Gallup Re-Engineering Performance Management“Gallup has found that employees who strongly agree they have had conversations with their manager in the past six months about their goals and successes are 2.8 times more likely to be engaged.”
  3. Gallup A Great Manager's Most Important Habit“Between 15 and 30 minutes is enough time for a meaningful conversation, but only if it happens frequently. In fact, 15- to 30-minute conversations have a greater impact than 30- to 60-minute conversations if they occur regularly.” “The takeaway is that feedback is meaningful to employees when their manager focuses on recognition, collaboration, goals and priorities, and strengths. And if these conversations happen every week, they can be brief.”
  4. Gallup Gallup Finds a Silver Bullet: Coach Me Once Per Week (Jim Clifton, The Chairman's Blog)“We lead through a habit of having one meaningful coaching conversation per week with each team member. The one coaching conversation per week can be in person, on the phone, email, Zoom, at coffee or standing in the hallway.”
  5. The Graduate School, University of North Carolina at Charlotte A New Approach to Promote Employee Engagement: One-on-one Meetings Between Managers and Direct Reports (dissertation defense abstract, Jonathan Flinchum)“Results suggest that 1:1 meeting quality—particularly manager relations-oriented behaviors—plays a stronger role in promoting direct report engagement as compared to 1:1 meeting quantity—with the important caveat that these meetings happen at least monthly.”