The best companies I worked for had no 1:1's. Eventually the company was acquired and the practice was "installed" by the acquirer.
The problem with this is we will ask, “if you want to talk about career progression, or go over a technical question, or talk about performance feedback, how do you get that from your manager?” And one might say, “just Slack them or ask them for a call.”
And the problem is that you now have created an environment where the voices the manager hears the most are the squeaky wheels, the people who can play politics. You don’t want that as a manager - you want an environment where you can get the best from all your team and everyone has the opportunity to get the benefit of a structured communication cadence with their manager, regardless of who plays politics.
There are some situations where you really don’t need 1-1s but these are rare edge cases (Jensen Huang is famous for not having them… but the people that report to him are senior enough to report to the CEO of the worlds largest company. So they don’t need much supervision.)
Second, scheduled 1:1 is not a mechanism to avoid politics. People who can play politics better are as much advantaged as they are without it. They will simply know better what to say and do in those 1:1.
With this approach, I hope you are not a manager.
The performative annual review meetings can be separate, sure. But managers should be discussing with their directs in 1:1s sufficiently that no criticism or praise contained within is heard for the first time.
Performance conversations are not once a year, they’re regular and routine.
On the flip side, if someone is not meeting performance expectations, you have to be having those conversations early, coaching / supporting so nothing is a surprise at review time, or worse… if you have to fire someone, they deserve the opportunity to fix the issue first so you want to be telling them where they stand and why.
On technical questions, sure - don’t save them for a 1-1, but I am able to be a sounding bound for my engineers when they mention what they’re working on, and I give them guidance. Sometimes they go, “oh yeah I’ve already thought of that, it won’t work for this reason.” And sometimes they go, “huh, I didn’t think of that. I’ll look into it”
Many teams can and do function well without rigid weekly 1:1s. The best performing companies I’ve worked for didn’t have anything resembling scheduled 1:1s. Everyone talked to their managers during their work and managers were available for conversations if you asked.
It’s interesting to hear from people who have only experienced these rigidly structured 1:1 situations who can’t understand how anyone could communicate without scheduled 1:1s.