Which made him a more productive cog in the machine fellow human-bot!
If the general mussings about a company, causual fun project and a little small talk about life require scheduled meething, you dont have those human connections with the team.
Did you considered that people understand difference between human connection, relationship and being one of mandatory duties/meeting with someone who is actually apart and disconnected?
It's also an opportunity to get on the same page about stuff or clarify things that might be a bit too long-form for a daily standup.
My 1:1s with my team lead vary between three minutes and 45 minutes; if there's a lot to cover, we cover it, if there's only one thing we discuss it and hop off. If there's nothing or if one of us is busy we just skip it.
I think the real benefit is that that time in my team lead's calendar is always blocked off for me if I need to use it for something so I don't have to wriggle around other meetings, appointments, etc. to get a slice of face-to-face time about something that doesn't feel 'important enough' to schedule a meeting for but which wouldn't get discussed otherwise.
A 1:1 is like asking to get lunch with someone — you don’t have anything specific to talk about but it puts you two together to talk about random things.
Unless you meet new people by exchanging printed lists of your interests and activities and marking which ones you are interested in, but the rest of us don’t tick like that.
Back in the day of 5 days in the office, this kind of connection happened through osmosis, not really necessary to schedule.
In this day of everyone remote, if you don't intentionally schedule time to just connect, it'll never happen.
