One-on-one meeting template you can copy, with an example

A one-on-one meeting template is a short outline a manager and one person on their team fill in together, usually every week or two: what is open from last time, the topics, feedback both ways, and what each of you committed to. The 1 on 1 template is free in Word and PDF, with an example.

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Rather not take notes by hand? Dalm is a Mac app that records the meeting — a call or a room — and drafts the notes from the transcript. Get early access

If you record the conversation, the Dalm app for Mac writes the notes from what was said instead: speech is recognised on your Mac and the audio never leaves it, while the transcript is kept in your account on our servers, where a language model reads it to write the notes.

What is in the one-on-one template

The notes are private to the two participants. The template has eight parts, and any part that was not discussed is deleted:

• Details — manager, team member, date, previous 1:1.
• Follow-up from last time — each commitment, who made it, done or not.
• Topics discussed — the topic, who raised it, key points.
• Feedback — manager to team member, and team member to manager.
• Growth and career — goals, skills to build, support needed. Only if discussed.
• Agreements — what the two of you settled.
• Commitments — action, who, by when.
• Next 1:1 — the date, and the topics to bring.

One-on-one meeting example

Example (fictional). Names and events are invented.

Manager	Marina
Team member	Anya (designer)
Date	Thursday
Previous 1:1	Two weeks earlier

Follow-up from last time

Commitment	Who	Done?
Find a UX writing course	Anya	Yes — picked one, starts in a month
Ask engineering to review mockups earlier	Marina	Partly — agreed for new screens only

Topics discussed

Topic	Raised by	Key points
Workload	Anya	Three projects at once; context switching slows everything down.
Design review of the selection screen	Marina	Screen sent back for rework; Anya wants clearer criteria before reviews.

Feedback

Manager → team member	The document screen was accepted on the first pass; the reasoning in the walkthrough helped.
Team member → manager	Review criteria arrive during the review, not before it.

Commitments

Action	Who	By when
Send review criteria two days before each design review	Marina	Starting next review
Propose which of the three projects can wait	Anya	Friday

Next 1:1. In two weeks. Bring: project priorities.

Growth and career, and Agreements, were not discussed this time, so they are left out. Each section has one to three lines; a one-on-one that needs more is usually two meetings.

How to fill it in

The notes belong to the two people in the room, and they work when both of them can read last time’s page and see what each promised. Five rules come with the template:

1. Keep it private. Share these notes only between the two participants unless both agree otherwise.
2. Feedback is about work, not personality. Record what was observed and its effect, in neutral words.
3. Commitments go both ways. Write down what the manager promised, not only the team member.
4. Start with last time’s commitments. That is what turns 1:1s into progress.
5. Skip empty sections. If career wasn’t discussed, delete it.

When this template is the wrong one

• Performance reviews, disciplinary talks, exit interviews: these are formal conversations with their own forms and consequences. Ask HR for theirs; this outline is not a substitute.
• Skip-level meetings: the questions are about the team and the manager in between, not about one person’s week.
• A meeting with a client: two people in a room is not a one-on-one in this sense; it has an agenda of its own.
• A one-off difficult conversation: write down what you need to say and what you want to happen next, rather than walking through eight sections.

Mistakes that make one-on-ones stop working

1. The meeting turns into a report on tasks — that is what the team meeting is for.
2. Only the manager writes the agenda — the other person’s topics go first.
3. An agreement without an owner and a date — nobody does it.
4. What was open last time is never raised — a month later the same question comes up for the third time.
5. The one-on-one is the first meeting cancelled when the week gets busy.
6. Recording without saying so — or putting into a shared document something that was said only to you.

If you are not going to record, how to take notes by hand covers the rest.

Notes written from the recording instead

Dalm records a call on your Mac without joining it as a bot: on a call your microphone is you and the system sound is the other person, and in a room the voices are told apart from the microphone. Speech is recognised on your Mac and the audio never leaves it; the transcript syncs to your account on our servers, and a language model reads that text to write the notes. For a remote one-on-one, recording a Zoom meeting covers the call side, and how it works shows what is kept where.

After the conversation the notes are laid out in sections, and which sections depends on what kind of meeting the app took it for. Where nobody named a date, the app is set to leave it empty rather than guess one. You can edit every line before you show the notes to anyone, and export them as Markdown, Word or PDF. Names start as the app’s guess or as a numbered speaker until you confirm them.

For regular meetings, items left open can come back in the next meeting of the same kind, marked “Open since …”; an item is carried over when the app judges it came up again, you can stop it with “Do not carry over”, and when the app only guesses that a meeting continues an earlier one, it says “Possibly a continuation”.

A manager’s one-on-ones with different people count as one series, so an item left open with one person can be offered in a conversation with someone else. Check carried-over items before you share the notes.

The app does not fill in this exact outline on its own. To get it, describe the outline once as your own template and open it on the meeting you want. If you switch the template on for every new meeting, it is written after every meeting, not only one-on-ones.

In a team workspace a meeting is seen by the whole team by default. A one-to-one can be set to elevated privacy, seen by the owner, the administrators and an access list, or to protected privacy, seen only by the meeting’s owner and the access list. The app decides what kind of meeting it was; you cannot set it by hand.

If you run one-on-ones with several people

A manager of managers usually wants everyone to use the same outline. In a team workspace, templates are shared across the organisation, like the dictionary and tags, so one description serves every manager. What the paid plans add and what they cost is on the pricing page; how roles and visibility work in a group is on the Team page. Keeping each person’s thread from week to week is on one on one meeting notes.