The 1:1 template: a ready-to-copy agenda

Two flaws ruin most recurring 1:1s, and they share the same cause:

• Building the agenda during the meeting, with no time to think before the conversation.
• Treating each 1:1 as if it were the first, working through topics without ever picking up what was said last time.

In both cases, continuity is missing. This page offers a ready-to-copy template, built around that single principle. It extends, on the implementation side, our guide to 1:1s.

An agenda rebuilt in the meeting is amnesiac

When the agenda is built live during the conversation, you forget half of what was said last time, and the commitments made dissolve in between. This is what produces the most stubborn anti-pattern: the same topics and the same blockers come back week after week without ever closing, not because they're unsolvable, but because nothing followed up on them.

It's also what separates a real template from a plain checklist. A checklist covers an isolated meeting; a template links one session to the next. The difference comes down to a single section, the recap of the previous session, and everything else follows from it.

Who runs the agenda

It's the single decision that shapes a 1:1 most, and often the one that gets overlooked: the agenda is opened by the report. The manager adds their points to it, but the conversation belongs to the other person first. When it's the manager who systematically structures the flow, the 1:1 slides into top-down reporting, they ask the questions, the other answers, and people stop opening up.

Letting the report open does the opposite. They come in with what's really on their mind, which surfaces signals an imposed agenda would never have brought out. The manager keeps their place: they add their points to the document, listen, question, and help make the calls. But they step into a conversation they don't have to run. A good way to test who really owns the agenda is to look at who filled it in before the meeting: if the answer is always the manager, the 1:1 isn't the report's yet.

Short, and above all empty

Another flaw lurks at the opposite end: inflation. By piling on sections so nothing gets forgotten, you end up with a form that invites mechanical box-ticking and ends up smothering the conversation. A good template fits on the screen and stays, when it opens, largely empty. That emptiness is no defect: it signals that the template is waiting to be filled by the report rather than by the manager. A template already pre-filled by the manager produces exactly the 1:1 you're trying to avoid, the one where one person reads out and the other follows.

The template

Here is a reusable template to copy into your shared notes tool. Both people have access to it and feed it between sessions. It follows the canonical four-beat structure: open, review, unblock, commit.

1:1 — [First name] & [First name] — [dd/mm]

## Weather (every week, these two lines don't change)
- Mood this week :   Very low     1  2  3  4  5   Excellent
- Workload :         Very light   1  2  3  4  5   Overloaded

## Recap of the previous session
- Tasks from last time :
  - [ ] [who] — [what] — [by when]
- Topics still open :

## Wins
- What have you accomplished since the last 1:1 ?

## Blockers
- What obstacles or blockers have you run into ?
  → task to create, and for whom : you / me / someone else in the org

## Priorities
- What are your priorities for the period ahead ?

## Support
- What support do you need from me ?

## OKRs in progress
- KR and progress update :

## Tasks before the next 1:1
- [ ] [who — report, manager, or someone else in the org] does [what] by [when]

Two elements of this template deserve a word. The Weather block, at the top, never changes: mood and workload get logged at every 1:1, even when all is well, because the value comes from the repetition.

Our article on the 1:1 in the OKR glossary details the five core questions of an effective 1:1.

The second point is turning a blocker into a task. A point the report can't lift alone doesn't just get noted: it becomes a task assigned to someone, the manager or another person in the organization. Without that explicit "who does what", the blocker evaporates between sessions. As for the OKR line, it ties the conversation to the objectives in play: it's the moment to update a Key Result's confidence score, without making it a topic of its own.

The loop from one session to the next

The strength of the template lies in its first and its last section, which are in fact the same. The tasks set at the bottom of the template, "before the next 1:1", become the "recap of the previous session" next time. So you open each 1:1 by checking what had been decided: what's done, what isn't, and why. Between two sessions, the document stays open; the report adds a topic the moment it emerges, the manager notes a piece of feedback they want to give in person. Nobody shows up empty-handed, and the agenda is no longer improvised at the start of the meeting.

Adapting the conversation to the context

Working from this template, the conversation should adapt to the context:

• The standard week follows the template as is, fed by the shared document.
• The return from leave first calls for a moment to get back up to speed: what moved during the absence, the decisions made without the person, the topics waiting for them, all caught up before getting to priorities.
• The crunch period calls for a tighter agenda, centered on trade-offs: what can wait, what can't, where you need backup. It's the worst moment to cancel the 1:1, and the best to shorten it.
• The project kickoff justifies a longer session than usual, to clarify the expected role, the decision scope, and the first milestones.

A special case: the 1:1 after a slip-up (a missed deliverable, a tension, a visible mistake) is often the worst-handled. The instinct is either to avoid it or to build a case, and both are wrong. You address the elephant in the room by naming the subject up front, and you let the person tell it before saying anything yourself. Concretely, you open with something like: "I want us to talk together about what happened on this. Tell me first how you experienced it, before I tell you what I made of it." Then you look for the cause, not the culprit: "What, in hindsight, would have made this go differently?" The conversation closes on a plan, not on a reproach. Handled badly, this kind of 1:1 teaches the report to stop raising anything.

In every case, the Weather block never moves. It's the fixed point that produces the signal: mood and workload get logged even in the weeks where there's seemingly something else to deal with. Logging them every time is what lets you detect shifts in mood, at the level of the individual, the team, and the organization. The most mature organizations are able to aggregate and track this indicator over time to spot risks as early as possible (and yes, Serendly does this automatically, anonymized, and alerts you when it drifts).

Where the document hits its limit

A template in a shared document is enough to get started, and it's the right way to begin. Its limit shows up over time, because keeping all of this by hand loses three things. First, the overall read of the two base measures: aggregating mood and workload across a team or the whole organization is what lets you see drift early, and a separate doc for each pair can't show you that. Then, the tracking of tasks coming out of blockers, which get lost the moment they're handed to someone other than the two people present. Finally, the preparation, which ends up costing more than the meeting itself and which you stop doing the moment the week gets busy.

That's exactly what Serendly is built for: the 1:1 runs on templates reused every week, blockers become tasks assignable to anyone in the organization, and an assistant pre-fills the next template from what has already happened and from your AI assistants' data, saving around twenty minutes of prep a week per report. One point worth raising up front, because the question always comes: only the two base measures, mood and workload, are aggregated and anonymized at the scale of the organization. The content of the conversation never leaves the 1:1. It's that boundary that lets the 1:1 stay a space for candid speech while producing a signal useful to the organization. To see how, discover our approach to 1:1s.