How to effectively manage a daily standup meeting?

Daily standups are responsible for enhancing your team's communication, collaboration, and coordination. But who is responsible for enhancing daily standups? You.

There are several ways you can do that, actually. We have listed a few points for you to effectively manage a standup below.

1. Don’t have a standup with more than 15 participants.

Now, having a large team is a good idea when you want to grow your business. But having a large standup? Not so much. Why? 15 minutes. The larger the group, the more difficult it is going to be to have an effective standup within that time frame.

So, why not split the team into two?

Say you have a team of 30 members. You would like to give each of them at least a minute, right? So, instead of running a standup that would anyway last 30 minutes, why not utilize that time cleverly?

Place 15 team members that need to be grouped together in one team and the other 15 members similarly in another team.

Now, you can run an effective standup that:

1. Does not reduce the engagement of team members as a result of a lengthy meeting.
2. Allows your team members to get started on their tasks sooner.
3. Reduces the chances of virtual meeting fatigue.

2. If there are inter-team members, run the standup for one team set and let them go.

So, you have a set of members who are working for one client and another set of members who are working for a different client. Holding a daily standup together with everyone in attendance till the very last minute doesn't sound helpful to anyone, right?

So, what can you do?

a) Conduct a standup for any one team first every day and let them go.

So, the standup team isn’t large enough to consider running two separate meetings, right? Just decide on team A (working with client A) to report their progress first and leave the meeting—cue for team B (working with client B) to start reporting their progress.

b) Alternate between the two teams every day to have a daily standup first.

Another way you can try out (just to be fair to everyone in attendance) is to start your daily standups on Monday with team A followed by their leave (cue for team B to start reporting their progress) and on Tuesday with team B followed by their leave (cue for team A to start reporting their progress). The alternating of teams each day reduces the risk of any unfavourable sentiments from the other team.

c) Run a priority-based standup with the required team.

You mean business. So, running standups with alternating teams is not your way to go when you need progress reports urgently from team B on a Monday. If you think calling on any team based on your work requirements is more helpful to you, you can choose to go ahead with this option. Just let the particular team know beforehand so they are mentally prepared to report their progress first and plan their tasks accordingly.

3. Inquire only about blockers and trust the team.

Trust breeds trust. No, we are not preaching, but proposing another way to run an effective standup.

So, as the team manager, you are mostly aware of what tasks are in progress and what is done. Also, you are informed of who is assigned what and what the deadlines are. So, instead of asking your team members what they worked on yesterday and what they will work on today, trust them to respect the deadlines and work to deliver the tasks on time.

Instead, focus more on how you can facilitate the correct delivery of tasks—by only asking them if they are facing any issues with the progress of their assigned tasks and scheduling a meeting post-stand-up meeting to discuss the mentioned blockers. This encourages them to identify and note down the impediments and bring them up on daily standups. You can then decide on the action plan to address these and ease your team members’ way to task completion.

This approach not only minimizes the risk of extended standups due to unrelated discussions but also shifts the focus from words to actions.

4. Prioritize the least important reports and have them drop the call.

So, you have team members, each of whom plays a specific role in the team, right? Now, there will be a few of them who, owing to the role they play, usually do not have a lot to report in the standup meetings. In contrast, there will be members, for example, backend developers, who have quite a lot to report about.

Now, if the members responsible for design do not have any dependency on the members responsible for the backend of your website, it hardly makes any sense to keep them for the length of the entire meeting.

So, what you can do is allow your designers to report their progress and blockers first. Once they are done doing so, they can drop off the call. Now you can concentrate on the other functions of your business, while your designers can make use of their morning energy to start working on their projects with complete focus.

5. Announce how long the meeting lasted each day.

Yet another way you can make your daily standups effective is by letting your team members know how long the standup meeting lasted each day. What this does is reinforce the idea that standup meetings should not run beyond 15 minutes.

If it wraps up within 15 minutes, good job by the team! If it doesn't, that means you’re having discussions unrelated to your tasks. The unrelated discussions also include your social conversations.

What happens is that, as managers of a remote team, we like to squeeze in a little social time into our daily standups. We do this because

a) It is usually the first meeting of the day.

b) This is the only time when everyone is sitting together as a team daily.

However, this can reduce the effectiveness of your stand-up meetings. Timing and informing everyone of the duration of standups daily will not only arrest the overrun of the meetings but also help your team members make substantive contributions through their words.

6. Discuss blockers after the standup meeting.

Now, the agenda of standup meetings only includes mentioning progress updates and impediments, right? So, why include yet another agenda in it—solving the mentioned blockers?

When you include this additional agenda item in your standup meeting, you are preventing team members who are not related to the task from starting their work. By doing this, you risk the disengagement of team members from daily standups since they can begin to look at the meetings as an inefficient use of their time.

What you can do, however, is hold a separate meeting to discuss the blockers with the required team members right after the standup meeting is over. This allows you focused time to decide on action items without the concern of prolonging the standup meeting and encroaching on other team members’ work time.

7. Make the stand-up meetings goal-focused instead of task-focused.

So, a lot of times, what we do is (and that is mainly because of how the standard standup questions are phrased) focus too much on the tasks that the team members have worked on or will be working on. The answers to these questions hardly give a picture of where the team is faring against the Sprint goal.

So, encourage your team members to report what their progress looks like against the current Sprint goal. This way, the team has a clear idea of whether they will be able to achieve the current goal. In case there are hurdles, the team can chalk out a plan to quickly overcome them.

One way you can shift the focus is by tweaking your daily standup questions a bit. So, instead of asking your team members, ‘What did you accomplish yesterday?’ Ask,  ‘In what ways did you contribute yesterday towards achieving the Sprint goal?’. The answer will provide the team with a concrete understanding of where each team member is on the Sprint plan.

The addition of a few words can bring about a significant change in how standup meetings contribute to helping your team achieve the Sprint goal.

8. Run asynchronous standup meetings using standup bots.

An efficient way to manage your daily standups is by running them asynchronously in a text-based manner. This means that team members can respond to the stand-up questions at their convenience, without any dependency on anyone. They can easily do so using Sup Bot, a standup bot for asynchronous meetings, from the comfort of their laptop or phone.

Add to Slack

Add to Teams

Add to Webex

• ‍Sup eases handling a large daily standup attendance.
  All paid plans on Sup allow you to run asynchronous text-based meetings for an unlimited number of team members. The flat pricing structure of the bot means that you can add participants to the standup meeting without having to worry about the increase in expenses.

• ‍Sup highlights blockers for quick resolution.
  Sup provides you with a list of blockers that are highlighted on the app dashboard, along with the name of the team member who reported them. So, once everyone has responded to the standup questions, you can go over to the dashboard to check if any blockers have been reported. If you find any, you can discuss the same with the team member who reported it over a call. Concise standup meetings on Sup pave the way for a long and detailed discussion about solving blockers.‍

• Sup provides standup question customizations.
  Sup allows you to customize your questions as per your needs. So, if you want to shift the focus of your daily standups from tasks to the Sprint goal, simply type in the right words to do so. If you want, you can even include more questions. You can make some questions mandatory while keeping others optional to answer. The range of answer types, as shown below, also allows you more ways to customize your daily standups.

‍
See how you can run an effective stand-up on Sup below.

Conclusion

Starting the workday with an effective standup meeting can significantly change the work process for your team. Your team can feel motivated to put in their best and boost their productivity. So, change the way you run your daily standups now!