The one-on-one meeting template, with a filled example

What a 1:1 is for, and what it is not

A 1:1 is the meeting where the person doing the work tells the person who can remove obstacles what is in the way. Everything else in the agenda is built around that.

Most bad 1:1s go bad in the same way. They turn into a status update. The manager asks what is done, the report lists tickets, both people leave with nothing they could not have read in the project tracker. Status belongs in writing. The 1:1 is for the things that do not fit in a ticket: the blocker nobody has escalated, the feedback that is easier to say out loud, the fact that someone is quietly bored and looking at job ads.

So the template starts with the person, not the project. That order is deliberate. If you open with the sprint board, the personal stuff never comes up, because there is always another ticket to talk about.

• It is a standing 30 minutes where the report sets the topics and the manager mostly listens.
• It is the place to raise a blocker before it becomes a missed deadline.
• It is the place feedback goes both ways, including feedback about the manager.
• It is not a status meeting. Status goes in a document or a tracker.
• It is not a performance review. Reviews are scheduled, written and formal. A 1:1 is none of those.
• It is not optional when things get busy. The weeks you want to cancel it are usually the weeks it is worth the most.

The six blocks, and why they are in this order

Six blocks, roughly 30 minutes. The order matters more than the wording. Each block hands over to the next one naturally, and the two blocks people skip are always the last two.

• 1. How are you, actually. Two or three minutes. Not a warm-up question, a real one. Energy, workload, anything outside work that is affecting the week. If the answer is always "fine", the rest of the meeting will be shallow too.
• 2. What is blocking you. The single highest-value block. Named obstacle, who or what it is waiting on, how many days it has been stuck. This is what a manager is for.
• 3. Progress since last time. Short. Not a ticket list. Two or three lines: what moved, what did not, what changed shape.
• 4. Feedback, both directions. Manager gives one piece of specific feedback with an example. Then the manager shuts up and asks for feedback back, and waits through the silence.
• 5. Career and growth. Where this person wants to be in a year, and what the next step toward it is. Ten minutes a month is enough, but it has to be on the agenda or it never happens.
• 6. What I owe you. The manager's own action items, said out loud, with dates. This block is the one that builds trust, because it is the one where the manager can be held to something.

The one-on-one meeting template (copy this)

Everything below is the template. Replace the text in square brackets. Keep the headings even when a block is empty, because an empty block is information: three weeks of an empty career section tells you something.

• 1:1 · [Manager name] and [Report name]
• Date: [dd Month yyyy] · Time: [hh:mm] · Length: [30 min]
• Where: [meeting room / video call / walk]
• Agenda owner: [Report name]
• 1. How are you, actually
• [Energy this week, workload, anything outside work worth knowing. One or two lines, written by the report.]
• 2. What is blocking you
• [Blocker 1: what it is, who or what it is waiting on, how long it has been stuck, what happens if it stays stuck.]
• [Blocker 2, if there is one.]
• 3. Progress since last time
• [What moved forward. Two or three lines, not a ticket list.]
• [What did not move, and why.]
• 4a. Feedback for you (manager to report)
• [One specific thing, with a concrete example. What happened, what the effect was, what to do differently.]
• 4b. Feedback for me (report to manager)
• [What the manager should start, stop or keep doing. Written by the report, ideally before the meeting.]
• 5. Career and growth
• [Where you want to be in 12 months. What the next concrete step is. What is needed to take it.]
• 6. What I owe you (manager's commitments)
• [Thing the manager will do, with a date.]
• Carried over from last time
• [Anything from the previous 1:1 that was not closed.]
• For next time
• [Topics either person wants to come back to. Next meeting date: dd Month yyyy.]

A filled example: Priya and Daniel, 14 April

Made up, but shaped like a real one. Priya Raman is an engineering manager. Daniel Okafor is a backend engineer, eight months into the job. They meet every Tuesday for 30 minutes. Daniel writes the doc before the meeting; Priya adds to it during.

• 1:1 · Priya Raman and Daniel Okafor
• Date: 14 April 2026 · Time: 09:30 · Length: 30 min
• Where: Meeting room 2
• Agenda owner: Daniel
• 1. How are you, actually. Honestly a bit flat. My partner started a new job two weeks ago so mornings are chaos and I am not sleeping properly. Work itself is fine. Asked if we can move this meeting permanently from 09:00 to 09:30. Priya said yes, from next week.
• 2. What is blocking you. The staging database credential from the platform team. Requested 8 April, six days ago, two follow-ups in their channel, no reply. The payments migration cannot be tested without it, so it is sitting at about 30 percent and I am filling time with smaller work. If it is not solved this week the migration slips past the 30 April date we gave finance.
• 3. Progress since last time. Shipped the retry logic on the webhook queue on Thursday; the duplicate-charge alerts have stopped since. Wrote the runbook for it, it is in the team wiki. Payments migration started but stalled, see above.
• 4a. Feedback for you. Priya: your pull request descriptions are too thin. PR #2214 said "fix bug" and nothing else, so Marta spent 20 minutes reading the diff to work out what it was for. Two sentences is enough: what was broken, and why this is the fix. Daniel agreed, said he does it when he is rushing at the end of the day.
• 4b. Feedback for me. Daniel: sprint planning runs 90 minutes and roughly half of it is the mobile workstream, which I never touch. Asked whether he can attend the first 30 minutes only. Priya said she will raise it with Kwame rather than decide alone, because the same question applies to two other engineers.
• 5. Career and growth. Daniel wants to move toward the senior band in the next 12 to 18 months. What he thinks is missing is leading one project end to end rather than taking assigned pieces. Priya said the notifications rework starting in Q3 is the realistic candidate, and that the gap to close before then is written communication, which is the same thing the PR feedback is about. Priya to send the senior band criteria document.
• 6. What I owe you. Chase the platform team directly for the credential, by Thursday 16 April, and escalate to Sam if there is still no answer. Send the senior band criteria doc today. Raise the sprint planning question with Kwame this week.
• Carried over from last time. Nothing open. The on-call handover doc from 7 April was finished.
• For next time (21 April). Walk through the senior band criteria together. Check the migration is unblocked.

How to fill each section without turning it into a status report

The template only works if the fields get filled honestly. Here is what each one is asking for, and the mistake that empties it out.

The report should own the agenda

This is the single change that makes the biggest difference, and it is one line in the template: agenda owner is the report.

The reason is not politeness. It is that the two people are looking for different things. A manager walks in with the questions a manager has: is the date going to hold, is the handover done, did the customer reply. Those are legitimate and they will fill 30 minutes on their own. What they will not surface is the thing the report has been chewing on for two weeks and has not found a way to raise.

In practice: shared document, report writes into it before the meeting, manager reads it beforehand and adds their own items at the bottom rather than the top. If a manager has something urgent, it goes at the end. The urgent thing almost always crowds out the important one.

New managers worry this makes them look passive. It does the opposite. Listening for 20 of 30 minutes and then committing to three concrete things in the "what I owe you" block reads as far more competent than talking for 25.

The running document: last time, this time, next time

This is the part almost everyone skips, and it is why 1:1s feel repetitive.

One 1:1 is not worth much on its own. The value is in the sequence. Someone mentions they are bored in week two; in week seven they mention it again in different words; in week eleven they resign. Any single meeting looks fine. The pattern was visible from week seven if anyone had been reading back.

So do not start a new blank note every week. Keep one running document per person, newest entry at the top, and give it three moving parts.

Read the last two entries in the five minutes before the meeting. That is the whole discipline. It takes almost no time and it changes what you notice, because you walk in already knowing what was promised and what has been said twice.

Variant 1: the weekly 1:1, and Variant 2: the first 1:1 with a new report

Weekly 1:1 (trimmed). At weekly cadence the full six blocks are too much, and forcing them makes the meeting feel like a form. Keep blocks 1, 2 and 6 every week, because those are the ones with a short shelf life. Rotate the rest: feedback one week, career the next. A weekly that is 20 honest minutes beats 30 minutes of filling in fields. Just make sure career and growth appears at least once a month, or it will quietly become never.

First 1:1 with a new report. This one is not about work at all, and the standing agenda actively gets in the way. You have no shared history, so there is no progress, no blockers worth the name, and feedback would be absurd. Replace the middle blocks with questions about how this person wants to be managed, and do the asking yourself rather than handing over the agenda, because they do not know yet what is normal here.

Questions worth using in that first meeting, roughly in this order:

• How do you like to get feedback: in the moment, or written down first?
• What did your last manager do that worked well for you?
• What did they do that did not work?
• How will I know when you are stressed, if you do not tell me?
• What do you want to be doing in two years?
• What is the fastest way to reach you when something is urgent?
• Is there anything about how you work that I should know now rather than find out in three months?
• How do you want this meeting to run, and what should I not turn it into?

Variant 3: the skip-level, and Variant 4: the difficult conversation

Skip-level. You are meeting someone who reports to one of your managers. The purpose is to hear things that do not survive the trip up the chain, and the risk is that it looks like you are checking up on their boss. Say the purpose out loud in the first minute, including what you will and will not repeat. Drop the progress block, since their manager already tracks it. Never leave with an action item assigned to that person, because it undercuts their manager. Everything you take away is yours to carry.

Useful skip-level questions: what is slowing your team down that your manager cannot fix alone, what recent decision do you not understand, what would you change about how the team works, who here is doing good work that I would not have heard about?

The difficult conversation. Underperformance, a behaviour problem, a decision the person will not like. Still a 1:1, but the shape changes. Write what you are going to say beforehand, in full, because the sentence that matters is the one people soften when they are nervous. Then run it like this.

• Say the point first. Two minutes in, plainly, once.
• Bring evidence. Dates, examples, the specific effect on other people.
• Separate behaviour from person. "The last three handovers were late" not "you are unreliable".
• Do not stack it. One topic. Save the smaller stuff for the next normal 1:1.
• Say what happens next, including what changes if nothing changes.
• Book the follow-up before you leave. A hard conversation with no second meeting rarely lands.
• Write it up the same day, and send your notes to the person so there is one shared version of what was said.

If you would rather not write it up by hand

Two honest things first, because a 1:1 is not a normal meeting.

Consent comes before convenience. Recording a 1:1 changes it. If your report thinks the recording might reach HR or their skip-level, they will stop telling you the true version of block one, and block one is the whole point. Ask in plain words before the first recording: what it is for, who can see it, how long you keep it. Take no for an answer without negotiating, and do not record a difficult conversation unless both of you agreed in advance. Some places also have legal rules on consent, covered in do you have to tell people you are recording a meeting. A reasonable default is to record the 1:1s where the report is comfortable and take handwritten notes for the rest.

If you do record, this is where the template and the app meet. Noter AI records an in-person 1:1 from your phone with one tap, or sends a bot to the call if you meet on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or Webex. Afterwards you pick an output style, and the Minutes of meeting style produces the structured write-up: what was discussed, decisions, and action items with owners. For the exact six blocks above rather than a generic structure, use the Custom style, describe them once, and reuse that description every week. Action items are pulled out on their own, so the "what I owe you" block stops being the one that gets forgotten, which is the same problem covered in how to get meeting action items automatically.

The running document is where it helps most. Every 1:1 is stored and searchable by title and AI notes, and you can ask questions across all your notes at once instead of one at a time. "What has Daniel raised more than once in the last three months?" is exactly what the running doc exists to answer, and it is easier to search across every meeting note than to scroll back through eleven documents.

One more thing that matters more than it sounds. Plenty of 1:1s are not held in one language. A report who is more fluent in Arabic, Hindi or Spanish often slips into it when talking about something personal, then switches back to English for the work part. Most tools make you choose a language before recording, so the second language comes back transliterated into nonsense and the honest half of the meeting is the half you lose. Noter AI tags language word by word across 60+ languages with detection always on, so a mixed sentence keeps both halves readable. More detail on transcribing multilingual meetings.

On cost: $9.99 a month or $49.99 a year, flat, not per seat. The relevant sum for a manager is not the team's seat count, it is your own calendar. Six reports on a fortnightly 1:1 is twelve conversations a month, so the annual plan works out at about thirty-five cents a conversation. The wrinkle worth naming is the other direction: because it is priced per person rather than per seat, your reports do not get access through your subscription, and there is no shared view of the team's 1:1s. That is deliberate, and for 1:1s it is arguably the right shape. Test it on one real 1:1 first, on iPhone and iPad or Android.

And if you would rather not record at all, the template above is complete on its own. Copy it, keep one running document per person, and it will do most of the work.