Why does managing the team takes so much work? Do you need to hold the hand of all your reports?
For example, a 30 min 1:1 with the report looking at their wellbeing, motivation, challenges, career goals should be a weekly task. The 30 mins is really 45 mins because notes need to be made following so that there is audit trail, and clarity of expectations for both parties. QoS is important so they can't be shoved back to back, otherwise one will find actively concentrating difficult after a while, so that's really 1hr per team member per week. That adds up pretty quickly.
Add in coaching sessions (min 1hr) on specific problems, analysis of team performance, handling of fires, meeting facilitation... This is all before you get to your own work.
Doing engineering management well is a tough job. People are complex and their needs likewise. Sometimes, it pretty much is holding someones hand. I've coached juniors to seniors and it's a lot of work, feedback, questioning, teaching.
Isnt all of that your own work, as a manager?
In light of this I budget the following time for each of them:
1 hour a fortnight for general chat (what I refer to as temperature taking) to see where each of them are at in terms of morale, etc.
1/2 hour a fortnight for 1:1 catch-up covering administrative requirements (leave, review of metrics, etc, etc).
1 hour a fortnight (1/2 per week) for metric collection and review; are they having trouble with specific elements of their domain, are certain managers, stakeholders, customers, etc, holding things up. Their work tickets vary wildly in complexity and scope so this is the absolute minimum I can spend to know where each person is up to professionally speaking.
1 hour a fortnight for mentoring, training, etc. Generally speaking the more skilled staff will contact me more often to "pick my brain" regarding how to approach certain technical/personnal challenges, how to link data across our datasets, who to contact for advice on this or that regulatory or statutory requirement.
And about half an hour per person, per fortnight reviewing their changes or service requests as I am primary CAB representative for my products - and these items are key outputs of the work they deliver.
So, in essence, four hours per team member per fortnight. Very little hand-holding for such a widely dispersed team, and they remain engaged and focused on their tasks with minimum disruption.
I think they're super useful, especially in a mostly-remote context.
I'd agree with you that weekly can sometimes be the wrong cadence; some individuals will find that an encroachment. I set the goal with my reports that they own the 1:1 meeting invite and can set the cadence as they see fit, within some prescribed limits. That has tended to have good results.