Automation isn’t necessarily a good thing. This is particularly true when the underlying process or inputs aren't highly consistent, which is exactly the case in building high performance organizations through people. Valuable touch points between people managers and reports are one of the fundamental tools in supporting and guiding employee performance.

So why on earth are most one-on-ones scheduled as recurring, weekly or bi-weekly meetings? The answer is that we have incorrectly automated a process that is in fact much more dynamic than we think.

" Recurring meetings offer convenience at the expense of efficacy. "

The HR processes of old, which focused on managing and mitigating legal risk and governmental compliance are passé. And yet it seems that fixed intervals, cookie cutter one-on-ones prevail. Why?

The most likely reason; people leaders are busy and haven't made time to revisit and re-evaluate the practice. We have admittedly fallen into the exact same trap. When designing our human capital management processes we naturally implemented a weekly one-on-one cadence to stay in tune with employees. So yeah, we're not holier than thou.

This is exactly why we built PeachyHR, to put modern best practices on auto-pilot.

So, if not recurring one-on-ones then what? We believe that one-on-ones are important rituals that are highly contingent on the participants and the state of the business. Neither of which will ever be properly captured with a recurring meeting with a generic agenda. The inevitable outcome of this style of meeting is each party frantically preparing for five minutes before the meeting, trying to remember what was discussed last time and what the action items were that neither party did. Doesn’t seem very high performing does it? The few that do excel, do so at their own expense in investing extra time on logistics rather than increasing organizational value.

With PeachyHR, we attacked this pervasive issue directly by intentionally preventing recurring meetings. Instead, we help facilitate effective meetings with predefined collaborative agendas and trackable action items, which alone adds immense value for both parties. And at the end of the meeting, the system guides you to not say "same time next week", but rather, "was this meeting valuable and when do we need to connect again to make progress?". Each meeting justifies the next meeting, including what should be discussed and when it should be. And it does all of this in a natural way, without additional effort.

The concept is simple (and probably scary for many). But try it. You will instantly see a change in how one-on-ones are approached and appreciated as a meeting of value creation, not a mundane meeting of recurrence.

When you see the difference, just know that PeachyHR is here to help you put the process on auto-pilot so that you don’t lose the benefits of accountability or traceability.

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