Recently, a growing number of executives have been celebrating their decision to cut back on one-on-one meetings. The reasoning sounds sensible enough. Calendars are packed. Focus time is limited. Efficiency has become the dominant metric of good management. If meetings are clogging schedules, then fewer meetings must be the answer.
But meetings themselves are not the real issue. The problem is holding the wrong kinds of meetings.
Why So Many Meetings Exist at All
Many recurring meetings — status updates, information sharing sessions, alignment rituals, and routine check-ins — exist largely because asynchronous systems don’t work the way they should. When documentation, communication channels, and decision records are unclear, people rely on meetings to compensate.
These meetings fill calendars because employees don’t know where to find information. They are unsure where the latest decision is documented, where the current version of a project lives, whether something changed overnight, or who is responsible for the next step.
Instead of searching through tools, risking mistakes, or guessing incorrectly, people schedule a meeting.
Meetings become a safety net. When everyone gathers at the same time, nobody can claim they missed an update. No one has to dig through multiple threads, platforms, or documents. The meeting itself becomes the place where work gets clarified.
Those types of meetings should disappear entirely. They shouldn’t just be shortened or optimized — they should be removed.
What One-On-One Meetings Are Really For
One-on-one meetings do not belong in that category.
One-on-ones exist because human beings need them. In a recent conversation on The Future of Less Work, organizational researcher Dr. Rebecca Hinds, founder of the Work AI Institute at Glean and author of Your Best Meeting Ever, described a simple test for determining whether a meeting should exist.Â
As Hinds explains, a meeting should only happen if its purpose is to decide, debate, discuss, or help someone develop. Status updates and information sharing rarely pass that test.
Even then, meetings should justify their time. Hinds argues that live discussions are most valuable when the issues involved are complex, uncertain, emotionally sensitive, or difficult to reverse. Most agendas do not meet that standard. The work that takes place in one-on-one meetings often does.
Manager one-on-ones exist because they create a consistent human channel where context is shared, expectations are clarified, concerns surface early, and trust develops over time. These conversations allow managers to understand what their employees are experiencing before problems escalate. They help identify misalignment early and recalibrate motivation, confidence, and priorities.
Their purpose is not to accelerate work.
Their purpose is to make better work possible.
That difference is becoming even more important today.
Why One-On-Ones Matter Even More in the Age of AI
As organizations introduce AI across their operations, leadership attention has naturally shifted toward efficiency. Leaders are evaluating which tasks can be automated, which processes can be accelerated, and which workflows can be compressed.
AI promises to free up time by handling execution, reporting, and coordination.
But that newly created time was never meant to vanish. It was supposed to be reinvested.
Under pressure to demonstrate speed and productivity, leaders often eliminate the most visible meetings first. One-on-ones are easy targets because they are recurring, predictable, and clearly marked on the calendar. Status meetings, on the other hand, often feel culturally embedded and politically harder to remove. As a result, organizations cut the conversations that create long-term value while keeping the ones that merely distribute information.
This decision carries real consequences.
One-on-one meetings are one of the few places where leadership actually happens. They allow managers to help employees navigate ambiguity, interpret competing priorities, reflect on decisions, and adjust direction.Â
They are where trust develops and psychological safety grows. They are where people learn how to think, not simply what tasks to complete.
As AI increasingly handles execution, synthesis, and routine decision support, the relative value of these human conversations grows. Judgment, context, emotional awareness, coaching, and sense-making become the real differentiators. Eliminating one-on-ones while automating everything else removes one of the few mechanisms employees have to adapt in an AI-driven workplace.
It also sends a strong cultural signal.
Canceling one-on-ones tells employees that human attention is optional. Protecting them communicates the opposite: that judgment, growth, and human connection still matter. In flatter, hybrid organizations where authority is often informal, those signals shape culture faster than any leadership statement.
And their importance will only increase.
As AI becomes widely available, the real advantage will not come from who automated the fastest. It will come from whose human operating system works best — the judgment, relationships, and working patterns that make an organization uniquely effective.
Status meetings should move out of the meeting room entirely. Information sharing should default to asynchronous channels with a clear source of truth. Decision meetings should be shorter and more deliberate.
And one-on-one meetings should be protected precisely because they are inefficient by design.
Efficiency has its place. But human work requires something very different.
