Organizing daily stand-up meetings help promote team collaboration and prioritize your business’s goals. What’s more, your team knows their objectives for the day in less than 15 minutes. Moreover, a stand-up meeting is an easy and effective way to synchronize your team’s work while eliminating roadblocks to success.
However, running an effective daily stand-up meeting is no easy task. To ensure that your team benefits from daily meetings, you must learn the top do’s and don’ts of running a stand-up meeting. Below, we discuss the pitfalls and rules of these meetings.
What is a Stand-up Meeting?
A stand-up meeting refers to a team huddle lasting about 15 minutes, with the number of attendees being anywhere between 3 and 11. Typically, the focus of this meeting is to prioritize goals for the day, resolve impediments, and ensure team members effectively finish all assignments in a particular time frame.
Moreover, businesses can easily track workflow and project status by meeting regularly. Simultaneously, the service industry can share all relevant and vital information during the team huddle. In both cases, you ensure consistency in your workforce. Plus, it is an incredible way to up your employee’s productivity.
How to Run a Standup Meeting?
Organizations opt for stand-up meetings instead of round-up ones to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of work collaboration. However, to ensure a beneficial team huddle, you need to know how to run a stand-up meeting strategically. Here’s a couple of things to keep in mind when running a stand-up meeting:
- Focus on completing critical tasks
- Be a great leader
- Answer all the vital questions
- Schedule a time
- Prioritize workload daily
- Combine your meeting with weekly rolling wave planning
- Instill a sense of urgency
- Try to meet face-to-face
- Replace Kanban boards with state-of-the-art, visual project management software
The Three Areas of Focus
Using FAQ’s, especially with a remote team, is a great way to ensure everyone is up-to-date with their daily objectives in the least possible time. It also makes sure everyone is attentive during the meeting. Below are the main three questions that outline your daily meetings:
1. Your Accomplishments – Your first question should be, ‘What did you accomplish yesterday?’ It will provide you with daily updates on what team members completed the day before.
2. Your Goals – Next, ask your team, ‘What are your plans for the day?’ Here, your employees will set goals for the day, so you and the rest of the team know what they’re covering. This synchronizes your daily team objectives.
3. Your Obstacles – Lastly, you must ask your team, ‘Are there any obstacles impeding your progress?’ This requires you and your team to identify anything that may hinder their progress for the day. Moreover, after acknowledging it, your team should instantly resolve it.
The Benefits of Running a Daily Stand-up Meetings
There’s a wide variety of benefits of running a daily stand-up meeting. Here, we’ve discussed the top six benefits of having stand-up meetings:
- Encourages communication and teamwork
- Reduces time spent per meeting
- Improves productivity
- Identify problems faster
- Allows you to measure progress within the team effectively
- Eliminates obstacles and roadblocks
The Best Practices for Running an Effective Stand-up Meeting
Stand-up meetings are a great productivity driver for you and your business. It is because when you encourage collaboration between members, identifying and solving obstacles become easier.
1. Set a Time – The main purpose of stand-up meetings is to ensure you and your team members don’t end up taking too much of anyone’s time. It is exactly why these meetings typically take only 15 minutes. Moreover, it is always good to put a timer or alarm in the room that alerts everyone when their time is over. It helps ensure the meeting does not drag on past time.
2. Establish a Goal and Stay Focused – Crafting a meeting plan isn’t that difficult; however, sticking to it is. Here, you may select a scrum master to organize meetings daily. Moreover, they’ll maintain a proper structure. On the other hand, stand-up meetings automatically prioritize tasks and reduce distraction and less important discussions.
3. Find a Format – Different organizations boast varying needs, workers, perspectives, culture, and so on. It means you need to take some time to figure out which meeting structure best matches your office.
4. Keep it Short and Sweet – Stand-up meetings are inherently short because no one wants to stand for hours on end. Moreover, the meetings tend to accommodate a lower number of people. This ensures each member gets sufficient time to update the team.
5. Offer Everyone the Chance to Speak Up – A brief meeting doesn’t mean teammates shouldn’t get equal opportunities to talk. Instead, dedicate a few minutes to each attendee. It allows them to ask questions, update the team on their progress, or share other important information.
6. Be Sure to Follow Up – After dismissing and establishing goals for everyone, you must follow up as well. It ensures effective communication and proper progression of projects. Moreover, it builds transparency and reiterates expectations.
What to Not Do During Daily Stand-up Meeting
Certain things can lead to the downfall of your daily scrum. Following are things you should avoid when running a stand-up meeting:
1. Don’t Sit Down – It’s called a ‘stand-up’ meeting. Thus, you must be standing up to attend it. Standing up enhances blood circulation and engages your muscles to activate chemicals that improve your mood and brainpower.
2. Don’t Drag the Meeting for Hours – If your team deviates from the meeting’s focus and starts engaging in personal conversations, the meeting will take a couple of hours. Moreover, if your meeting continues for too long, it may end up being ineffective.
3. Don’t Let it Turn Into a Status Report – The main objective of stand-up meetings is aligning your goals, not crafting a report to the person in charge. Ensure none of your team members spends too much time rambling about a topic.
Conclusion
Generally, stand-up meetings are an excellent way to boost productivity and increase communication within the team. Moreover, you can track the progress of each member this way. The best part is that you get a break from long, round-table gatherings.
Author Bio
Amanda Athuraliya is the communication specialist at Creately, a visual workspace for team collaboration. She is an avid reader, an experienced writer, and a passionate researcher who loves to write about all kinds of topics.
