Does Your Team Really Need a Daily Stand-Up Meeting?

Most daily stand-up meetings make whatever they’re trying to solve worse as a result of eating up team time and focus.

First, let’s look at real meeting math. The daily stand-up isn’t just the 15-30 minutes of the stand-up — when we talk about meetings, we also need to include the prep, post, and slack time. That stand-up meeting eats up at least one hour of teammate time — so if you have five teammates, that’s at least 5 hours of team time. 

Five hours of team time per day per week adds up; given that the average knowledge worker makes ~$30 per hour, that’s $3,000 per month in wages for just this meeting, for five people.

Should you still decide to do daily stand-ups, despite knowing this, here’s what not to do:

1. Don’t use stand-ups as a verbal readout of people’s task lists. You’ll get far too much noise and undermine the chances of people actually using their work management software.
2. Don’t use them to figure out your priorities for the day. This is the surest way to get caught up in the urgency spiral, where the urgent always outweighs the important. The work that would most move the needle gets constantly neglected in favor of reacting to and putting out the next tiny fire on deck.
3. Don’t schedule stand-ups at a time that makes people end up with incoherent Swiss Cheese schedules. For instance, having a meeting at 9:30 (when people start work at 9) means most people can’t or won’t be able to commit to deep/focus work for the whole morning. They’ll spend the time after the meeting getting re-sorted, doing a bit of work, and then start transitioning to lunch. Better to do it at 11 am so people can have a full focus block in the morning and then transition to lunch, since they’re going to be doing that anyway.

Here’s what TO do:

1. DO share timely information that requires some conversation or questions for clarification. Playing 20 questions on Slack or Teams all day is worse than having a quick convo to discuss the specifics of a project.
2. DO ask people to share their (one) priority project or task for the day. This makes prioritization a team habit and ensures folks are aligned.
3. DO ask if your team has any blockers or support needs. Build the team habit of team members helping identify each other’s blockers and support needs, while normalizing the reality of blockers and needs for support. (Don’t penalize people asking for support or bringing up potential blockers.)

As I write in Team Habits, most bad or counterproductive meetings are a result of other poor team habits. If your team’s habits around decision-making, prioritization, and collaboration aren’t working, you’ll end up having a lot of crutch meetings to address those issues. 

But crutch meetings cost your team’s most precious resources: their time and their attention.

This means that often, the best way to fix bad meeting culture isn’t just to work on improving meetings, and adding new ones. It’s by starting with the root issue with your team habits, that is, working on decision-making, planning, communication, so that the endless unproductive meetings won’t need to keep happening. 

I’ll turn it over to you: if you’re doing daily stand-ups, what are the root challenges or (bad) team habits that are creating the need for the daily stand-ups?

The post Does Your Team Really Need a Daily Stand-Up Meeting? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.

I’m pretty sure ‘status update’ meetings aren’t work

Status update meetings are ones where no decisions are made and no forward planning takes place. As such, they can be considered superfluous to well-run organisations and effective collaborations. There are better ways to manage people and projects.

I find that status update meetings are a bad habit that organisations get into for one of several reasons. It could be that they don’t know better. With these kinds of organisations, working with WAO and organisations like us can be a revelation. In fact, that’s been the case many times, especially with smaller charities.

Another reason for the status update meeting can be a lack of standardised toolset. In these kinds of organisations, everyone uses their own ‘to-do’ list, from pen and paper through to some complicated digital workflow. The status update meeting therefore acts as an inefficient kind of ‘API’ (or translation) between these siloed systems.

A third reason that status update meetings exist is that people are employed to work fixed hours. This is the most pernicious. It might not even be a conscious thought, but if you’ve got hours to fill, there’s nothing as low-bar as a status update meeting to while away the time.

The easiest way to get out of the habit of status updates is to know what the alternative is, to decide on a standardised toolset, and to turn those meetings into co-working sessions.

At WAO we used the simplest tools possible to get the job done. Over-complicated toolsets and workflows are the enemy of collaboration and, in fact, can be thought of as a form of procrastination.

Essentially, all you need is a place to put three lists: To Do, Doing, and Done. If you’re physically co-located this could even be on a wall. WAO uses Trello as we find it everyone just ‘gets’ it. You can add extra lists as necessary (we use ‘Epics’, ‘Feedback’, and ‘Zombie Garden’).

What this means is that status update-related conversations happen on the Trello board. The meetings that used to happen to keep everyone up-to-date can now either be eliminated or turned into co-working meetings.

At WAO, we have at least one co-working meeting per client every week. In these meetings we check in, bringing our full selves to work, prioritise what needs doing, and then either work on those things together, or divide and conquer. As we’re fully-remote, the latter looks like muting audio and video for a set period of time (usually 15, 30, or 45 minutes) and working on a task. We can can unmute and ask questions if necessary.

The above can sound like it might drain the fun out of work. I can assure you it’s the opposite. Status update meetings drain energy out of people and projects. Co-working and representing progress visually is invigorating.

Try it! You might be surprised.

The post I’m pretty sure ‘status update’ meetings aren’t work first appeared on Open Thinkering.