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.

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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.

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