Daily Standup: Go beyond just standing up

More and more teams are moving to the idea of needing to connect and check in with each other more consistently. It makes a lot of sense, especially in this hybrid/remote work environment. Even though daily standups started as primarily an engineering team activity, there has been a lot of adoption amongst other teams. So what is a daily standup? At its core, daily standup in a short, concise team meeting focused around highlighting what a person has done the day before, what they are working on that day, and what they might need help with. The critical thing is to keep it short and to the point so that the team doesn't get distracted.

If having a good daily standup is so important, how do you make it not boring? Let's take a look at what habits often take the standup meeting from yay to nay. 

🚩 #1. Misalignment

The biggest offender is definitely misalignment amongst the team on what needs to be discussed. If people start talking about topics that are not related to other people's work in any way. Or perhaps something that only applies to 1 other teammate in a ten-person standup. What do you think the rest of the team is doing when that happens? 

Not ideal, I am sure you agree. 

This is important to catch and redirect because when that happens, teammates might mentally check out for the rest of the standup and miss essential updates.  So focus on discussing updates and issues relevant to everyone or almost everyone. Everything else can be taken offline. 

🚩🚩 #2. Too long 

Welcome to the era of 40-second attention spans. No one wants to be stuck in a meeting for an hour at the start of the day while important work/calls/tasks are not getting done. There are a few reasons why standups sometimes go on for too long:

• Folks chatting about off-work topics (not a bad thing but can derail the meeting) 
• Someone is rambling and takes 5 mins to find the end of the sentence. 

There were too many people at the meeting. According to the Scrum Guide, standups should be kept to a nine-person maximum. When teams run standups with overly large groups, it tends to be ineffective and go on much longer than people can pay attention to.

Solution - keep your standups at 15-20 min max and stick to that time. It might seem shocking at first, but it will help the team highlight the crucial updates and figure out the action plan sooner. 

🚩🚩🚩 #3: Solving problems right then and there 

Standup shouldn't be the time to solve a person's issues. Solving it right then and there or elaborating discussions after possible solutions is what tanks standup meetings' effectiveness. Sync after the meeting to go through the issue so that the standup is reserved for highlights and roadblocks. 

🚩🚩🚩 🚩#4: Not Listening to Teammates

Raise your hand if during standup you were either figuring out what you were going to say or doing something else entirely?

While this makes sense (since nobody wants to embarrass themselves or stumble during their turn), you will likely miss out on valuable information by not paying attention to other people's updates. Everyone'sEveryone's time is valuable, so encourage people to stop doing everything else and just pay attention to this meeting. 

🚩🚩🚩 🚩 🚩#5: Skipping Standups

Just because the meeting is internal does not mean it is any less valuable than a client-facing one. Make sure everyone treats the meeting with importance and can find value in connecting; also, not having an established daily standup routine and consistent meeting cadence can lead to people skipping/forgetting standups.

With the Daily Standup Flow, you can easily choose a cadence and time that works for your team long term. Long-term commitment = long- term results.

Now that you know what to avoid in your standup meetings, you can get the whole team onboard and more effective in no time. Ready, set, STANDUP.