Daily stand-up meetings might be the quickest way to waste our time as a leader. As a manager, we have likely witnessed this first-hand. Our daily stand-up meetings have become bloated and unengaging, the more time passes and the bigger our teams grow. Should we be doing something different? And if so, what? Has the time to kill the daily stand-up meeting come? Here are some alternative perspectives:…
Why Daily Stand-Up Meetings Do Not Always Work
01. Many oars, too many directions:
The original intention behind a daily stand-up meeting is extremely sound. Popularized by the Agile methodology of project management, daily stand-up meetings are meant to share progress and identify any blockers the team is facing. For the few teams who strictly adhere to only sharing status updates and blockers, a daily stand-up can serve them well.
However, for most of us in practice, it is a different story. We get overly excited and cram other intentions into our daily stand-ups: We want them to be an energizing morale booster for the team, a time to reflect on what went well, an opportunity for team members who don’t regularly talk to each other to feel connected… No wonder daily stand-up meetings start to run over, with folks rambling, and people disengaging.
Try to do all three at the same time, and we end up having too many oars, rowing in too many directions. A bloated, ineffective meeting manifests.
02. Twenty hours down the drain per week
Say we are able to miraculously, consistently hold 10 – 15 minute daily stand-up meetings with our team. But as we switch gears to dig back into our work, what we do not realize is that it takes an average of 20/25 minutes to get back to the task at hand.
This means the time a team member needs to recoup from the daily stand-up is longer than the daily stand-up meeting itself. That is an irreversible 25 minutes taken away from every single one of our team member every week. So if we have 10 team members, that’s 20 hours poured down the drain. Is the cost of the interruption worth it?
03. Lack of recorded history
Someone calls in sick and cannot make the daily stand-up meeting. A remote employee cannot participate in the daily stand-up because it’s 1AM their local time when it’s 9AM for the rest of the team. How do you ensure that everyone is on the same page, especially as our team grows and becomes more spread out? With daily stand-up meetings being in-person or over Zoom, we lack a shared recorded history of the progress being made.
This particularly becomes apparent when someone new joins the team. We would love to be able to share the week-to-week progress the team has made to give them full context on a project… But with daily stand-ups meetings, that history is scattered in a series of haphazard notes at best and does not provide the new hire a complete picture.
So What To Do Instead?
There are a few options for either replacing our daily stand-up meeting and/or alternatives to holding them.
01. Automate status updates with a tool.
Status updates are a critical part of ensuring everyone on the team is on the same page. But they do not need to happen during an in-person daily stand-up meeting. Instead, we can ask folks to take 30 seconds to write a few bullet points on what they worked on yesterday, what they plan to work on today, and any blockers they have. They can answer on their own. An email or Whatsapp/Slack message every day asking, “What are you working on today?”, will also work. It takes a minute to respond and it helps orient the team’s day without pulling their attention away from the work itself.
We can customize the questions to be more specifically geared toward our team (e.g., “What’s something that might be blocking us today?”) and change the frequency to be as often as we would like. With this, we also have a complete recorded history of everyone’s progress over time.
02. Use a monthly all-hands or weekly staff meeting to focus on other functions.
We see that, although well-intended, we have too many varying purposes for our original daily stand-up meeting (e.g., we wanted to align the team around a vision and help build rapport in the team). We could decide what specific functions are most important in our team to foster, and then devote other meetings, processes, or tools to fulfilling these functions. For example, here are functions we could incorporate into a monthly all-hands meeting or weekly staff meeting…
a) Reflection: Using a weekly staff meeting to encourage shared reflection about what could be better. For example, we could pose the question, “Knowing what we know now, what would we change about how we approached this project?”
b) Recognition: Take time during a monthly all-hands meeting to highlight positive progress that has been made. We could ask, for instance, “What’s something we have been surprised or encouraged to see us accomplish?” or “When is a moment we have felt proud of working at XXX, and why?”
c) Connection: Carve out some time during the all-hands or staff meeting to enable people to connect with what they enjoy most about working on the team. We could ask fun non-work related questions like, “What’s the thing you bought with your own money?” or “Who’s the most famous person you have met?” We can also use Social Media Question Tools for this.
d) Vision: Use an all-hands meeting to align folks in our team around vision and how each team member contributes to that vision. For example, we could ask our team: “If someone were to ask you what the vision of our company is, would a clear answer come to mind? How do you feel your individual work is contributing to that vision?”
The best process results from what is deliberate and thoughtful – not what is convenient and familiar. Daily stand-up meetings are an antiquated relic. Is it time to sunset them.?
Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa
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