Why your team needs to start every morning with a standup

Many teams are facing remote work for the first time due to COVID-19. For some, the last few weeks have been riddled with project roadblocks, communication breakdowns, and feeling isolated from teammates and colleagues.

Whenever I'm facing a new challenge or problem (often), I always remind myself that I certainly can't be the first person to have encountered such an issue before.

So, where can teams look for some problem solving inspiration? Who has encountered remote teamwork before? How did they stay connected? How did they overcome?

The standup.

If you and your team haven't already, it's time to borrow (permanently steal) a concept from agile teams - the daily standup. A standup is a quick meeting, usually about 15 minutes in length, that has the same goal and agenda every time. Each team member provides updates on accomplishments, works in progress, and requests for help. It's how agile teams start every day.

The standup helps bring team members together and foster collaboration. It promotes visibility and can assist teams in identifying potential risks and pitfalls before it's too late.

The standup acts as an anchor, a daily ritual, which provides structure in a world currently summarised by one word: chaos.

Now that we're feeling existential, let's discuss the ingredients for running effective standups.

How to conduct an effective standup.

Choose the same time, everyday, that suits everyone on the team. If you can make the mornings work, that's ideal. Standups are a great way for teams to start their day. Make the meeting recurring, have everyone join with video, and promise that no one will judge each other for messy hair. Also, the standup waits for no one. Start on time, every time.

Use the same agenda for every standup. If a topic isn't related to one of the questions below, it can get its own meeting. For an effective standup, have each person take turns answering the following questions:

What did you accomplish since we last met?

What are you working on today?

What roadblocks are you facing?

Especially with the last question, you may find that people naturally start problem-solving and solutioning in the standup. This is great! This is exactly what we want! But not in the standup. If you find that the conversation begins to spiral, encourage people to continue their discussion when the standup has finished, and move on to the next team member.

Coffee. This is actually optional but highly encouraged.

Try it out. You have very little to lose.

Standups are one of those cheap and cheerful processes you can easily add to your team and rip out if it's not working. At your next team meeting, that will eventually go 30 minutes over and contain a succession of tangents, why not suggest you try out a daily standup for a week. If standups don't work for your team (unlikely), then you simply don't have to continue them.

Commentors below: Any tips you've discovered for running effective standups? What have you done to make them work for your organisation?