Our team picked up some of these practices by adopting agile development, mainly the product demo and the retrospective meeting. We scheduled the meetings for the middle of the week (demo at 10 AM Wednesday, retrospective at 10:30, iteration plan at 11:30). The mid-week break had some advantages - we could work weekends if we needed to, and people had a rough idea on Friday what they were doing Monday and could start the week productively.

One-on-ones weren't part of the agile process, but they were extremely valuable. I scheduled them on Thursday, but after reading this, I can see the value of doing them before the group meeting - I'll try that with the next team.