Have you tried building trust? The tone of your comment here makes me think you haven’t. If you build trust with people, they’ll just tell you things. If you just say they can tell you things, no rational employee will believe that. And pushing people to talk about their weekend or other aspects of their personal life is downright toxic IMO. Again, if you build trust and rapport, you won’t have to ask these rote, off-the-shelf questions that can put people into a wary state of mind.

I would venture to suggest that they give you status updates instead of what you're really looking for because you have these meetings every week - how much is happening in the space of four and a half days since the last 1:1 that they can't deal with themselves or raise in the stand ups? Probably not a lot. And if you're looking for complaints, suggestions, etc., in 1:1s, then what are the retrospectives for? A former manager once asked me how frequently I wanted to have 1:1s with him, and my reply was never, but he insisted so I offered once a month and we ended up doing it fortnightly. I never felt like it was helpful.

Not to mention that as engineers, they probably value extended blocks of uninterrupted time to focus on being productive;

> 30 minute 1:1’s every week with my team (8 engineers). I’m in weekly backlog grooming sessions, semi-weekly demos, retros and sprint planning and of course daily standups

With respect, this sounds like hell to me. The only thing I would be complaining about is that you were tying me up in meetings so much that I couldn't get any actual work done.

And however friendly you are with your team members, you're still their manager and they probably don't feel close enough to freely share much of their personal lives with you - that's generally the nature of the relationship and there's nothing wrong with that.

In 1:1s with my managers I was always happy to get the undivided attention of my manager to discuss status updates.