Do boring stand-ups leave your team sleepy?

Whether to stand up or not to stand up is the real question. Does your team drag through those early morning stand-up calls?

Chances are that your team members are among the thousands of employees who feel that stand-ups are more often than not pointless. That’s likely to happen when a team’s stand-up meetings are reduced to status checkpoints. In today’s edition of The Top newsletter, let’s reinvent efficient stand-up calls for you.⭐

What should a stand-up call look like?

First things first, let’s get the idea behind stand-ups right. It is supposed to be a short meeting, with concise messages and quick updates, ideally wrapped all within 15 minutes every day. As part of the agile working methodology, stand-up calls help a team sync up and find immediate solutions to problems that someone else might be facing.

An ideal stand-up looks like this –

“I am working on issue #78, but I’m stuck on this issue. Does anyone know how this is supposed to work?”🙂

On the other hand, most stand-ups unfortunately sound like this –

“I have completed working on #56 and today I will do #78 and..”😞

It often ends up being a litany of daily to-do lists. One person does not know why they should listen to someone else’s things to do. Right?

Quick Fixes for Effective Stand-ups

Here are a few things to change:

• Start from the shared goal: If everyone is working on different ideas, there’s bound to be limited scope for collaboration or even the need for coordination. Thus, ensure that your team performs on different parts of the same shared goal instead of different goals altogether. 🎯
• Create a safe space: How’d it be if you were asked to share your difficulties in front of a few people first thing in the morning? A little awkward, at least, right? Often, team members struggle to share their issues with their teams, too. As a manager, you can take steps to create a safe space for everyone where getting stuck is not seen in a negative light. 🤗
• Lead by example: Use the stand-up calls to set examples for how you want them to go. Be vulnerable and share your problems, ask for suggestions, share additional context to drive collaboration, and bind the team together effectively. 💪
• Encourage cross-functional collaboration: You can encourage your team members to help each other solve problems and offer tips. 🤝

Lastly, and most importantly, ask your team about the management processes that they work with. While something may perform well for many teams, it may not be the ideal solution for yours, too. Solutions to many people management challenges must be customized to suit a team and their manager’s specific context.