Meeting types · One-on-one
One-on-one minutes, without the note-taker.
A one-on-one is the meeting where the other person is watching your face — and a manager typing into a laptop is a manager not listening.
One-on-ones fail in a particular way: they are pleasant, useful and completely undocumented. Someone raises a workload problem, a manager agrees to look into something, both leave satisfied, and by the next one-on-one neither can remember what was promised. The meeting becomes a warm ritual with no memory, which is precisely how good people conclude that raising things changes nothing.
Notes are hard here because the meeting is intimate. Typing while someone tells you they are struggling reads as note-taking on a person rather than listening to them. Most managers correctly choose to close the laptop, and then predictably forget most of what was said. Writing it up afterwards is not much better, because the particular sentence someone chose to describe a problem is exactly the thing that gets rounded off first.
Recording changes the trade-off, if it is done openly. Ask first, explain that it is so you can act on what they raise rather than half-remember it, and accept a no without argument. Then GetNotes transcribes the conversation and writes out the commitments — yours and theirs — with owners, so the next one-on-one can open by working through what was agreed last time.
That continuity is the entire value. Development conversations, career discussions and workload concerns only work when they accumulate. A manager who arrives having read last month's actions is a different manager from one who arrives asking 'so, how's things?' It is also the difference between a promotion case built on dated examples and one built on a general sense that someone has had a good year.
Where it earns its keep
The third time they mentioned it
An engineer has now raised the same on-call burden in three consecutive one-on-ones, each time slightly more carefully. Without a written thread across meetings, it reads to the manager as a passing comment each time rather than the pattern it obviously is.
Promotion evidence six months later
A promotion case needs specifics: what they took on, when they stepped up, what feedback they got and how they responded. Reconstructing that from memory at review time produces a vague case. Ten one-on-ones' worth of notes produces an evidenced one.
The difficult conversation you want a record of
Performance concerns raised early and clearly are fair. The same concerns remembered differently by two people months later are a dispute. A record of what was actually said, and what support was offered, protects both the report and the manager.
How GetNotes works
- Record or upload. Hit record on your phone or laptop in the room — or drop in an audio file you already have. No bot joins anything.
- It writes it down. Every word transcribed, every speaker labelled, in 90+ languages including ones that switch mid-sentence.
- Share the minutes.Summary, decisions, and action items with owners — ready before everyone's back at their desk.
Questions, answered
Should I record a one-on-one at all?
Only with the other person's agreement, asked for plainly and revisited if the conversation turns personal. Explain that you record so you can act on what they raise rather than half-remember it, and offer to stop at any point. A recording made without consent poisons the exact trust a one-on-one runs on, whatever GetNotes or any other tool makes technically easy.
What if my report says no?
Then don't, and don't make it awkward. Take a short set of written actions at the end of the meeting together instead — spoken aloud and agreed — which is a decent substitute for the continuity a recording gives you. GetNotes is useful for the one-on-ones where recording is genuinely welcome, not something to push on the ones where it isn't.
Are these notes private to me as the manager?
Recordings and notes in GetNotes sit in private storage with row-level security, so only your account can open them. There is no shared feed and nothing is posted anywhere. Sharing happens only when you choose to share a specific set of minutes. If you record a one-on-one, tell your report who will and won't see the notes.
How do I use last month's notes in this month's meeting?
GetNotes writes action items with owners for each meeting, so the fastest habit is to open the previous one-on-one's minutes before you walk in and start by going through the outstanding items. Five minutes of preparation turns a disconnected series of chats into a conversation that visibly accumulates.
Other meeting types
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