5 Ways Effective Teams Run Daily Slack Standups

The massive popularity of Slack has turned daily Slack standup meetings into a must for teams who use the tool as their primary synchronous or asynchronous communication platform.It sounds easy enough, everyone gets on and updates Slack once a day to let the team know what they are working on. But, if you’ve done this for a while, a few tools, tips, and tactics help. 

5 Effective Tips For Daily Slack Standup Meetings

1. Stick To 3 Simple Standup QuestionsWe use and recommend the same questions to all our Jell customers. These questions, originally from long-standing scrum practices, get to the point, and over time you won’t even have to restate them, everyone will just know 1… 2… 3…

1. What did you accomplish yesterday?
2. What do you plan to accomplish today?
3. What challenges stand in your way?

Here’s an example of how you might respond to the questions:

1. What did you accomplish yesterday?

Yesterday I met with Jenni in billing, and I wrote discount documents for the sales team for the upcoming sale.

2. What do you plan to accomplish today? 

Today, I’m going to introduce the sales team to the discount documents I put together.

3. What challenges stand in your way?

I’m waiting for the marketing team to approve the language of the sales documentation.

2. Choose A Morning Deadline for Submissions

This works well if everyone works the same hours. It’s best for the team manager to establish a deadline so they can spend time each morning looking at the answers.This encourages employees to get it done each day, instead of continually putting it off. Pick a time that works for your business. If many of your employees start work at 9am, 10am is a great time since it gives them an hour to get their morning organized. Move it to an hour after the start of the workday.

3. Add Reminders for Submissions

One way to make sure everyone gets their submission in before the deadline is to add a reminder to the standup channel. Give the team a reminder about an hour before all submissions are due.Jell integrates with Slack and reminds your teammates to turn in your standup responses.

4. Encourage Team Members to Bring Up Blockers

Encourage team members to mention someone they are waiting on in their standup. Remind your team that this isn’t calling someone out, it’s simply letting the team and leader know they are working with someone on a project, and it isn’t finished yet. Also, the scrum master can help you if you have a teammate who isn’t picking up the slack and completing their work in time. This way your scrum master can help move things forward without causing conflict between you and your teammate.

5. Take advantage of Slack’s Slash commands

With Jell, you can manage your standups directly from Slack with these helpful slash commands. Simply type /jell help from Slack for more info. 

What is a daily standup?

A daily standup is a team meeting organized on a regular (often daily) basis to present status updates to all members of the team. Usually, standups are limited to 5-15 minutes in length (depending on the size of the team).Team members take turns talking about their progress since the last standup, the anticipated progress until the next standup, and any “blockers” or impediments getting in the way of their workflow.These meetings are also called “daily scrum meetings” or “status meetings.”

Why do we need Slack standup meetings?

Standups align strategy with execution. Standups answer questions like:

• What needs to be worked on?
• What is everyone else on the team working on?
• Where are we going as a team?
• Are we working together?
• What is our broad goal and how can we execute our strategy to meet the goal?

Daily standups in Slack focus on goals and align the strategy to meet those goals.

Benefits of Daily standups

Just like regular meetings, you’ve probably felt at one point or another that your daily standup meeting should have been an email. Often, you may think, the cons outweigh the pros.And you’re not wrong. standups frequently go off the rails, last longer than planned, and disrupt your morning work routine. Your sentiments are heard and felt by many.Common complaints experienced by teams include:

• Problem-solving during the meeting
• Sharing irrelevant updates
• Digressing into off-topic conversations
• And many more!

1. Increases Employee Motivation and Morale

Every employee at your company is working on a project. It may seem as though you’re the only one doing work around the office (and let’s be honest, your coworkers probably think they are the only employees in the office who are working), which is why it’s important to hear or see what your other coworkers are doing at your company.Seeing the work you’re completing in real-time is motivating and having a clearly defined workflow prevents burnout. The bonus is that your coworkers and managers also see a list of what you’re completing each day.Now, the goal isn’t for your manager to micromanage you or passive-aggressively bully you into turning in impressive work every day in your daily standups. In fact, there shouldn’t be a grading system at all. What you and your team present in the daily standup isn’t indicative of your performance, but an update on your weekly tasks.Updating your team yields benefits too:

• You can publicly check off your task. Checking off a task in front of your peers. Announcing the end to your task can make you feel good that your team contribution is recognized.
• You feel a lot less lonely in the work you’re contributing. Providing daily updates allows difficult projects to feel manageable. standups are designed to show progress or solicit assistance if it’s needed.

2. Promotes communication in the workplace

Some teams communicate well and other teams, well…not so much. Both teams benefit from daily standups.Communicating throughout the day is great but isn’t a sufficient replacement for a standup. standups are task-specific communication. This is information that is relevant to the current sprint a team is in. This information needs to be visible to the entire team. Daily standups structure communication because of their hyper specificity. Conversations only revolve around what was worked on yesterday, what is currently being worked on now, and what blockers are getting in the way.Standups promote structured conversations. There isn’t any stress on what to say, because what to say is limited to three questions.

3. Promotes trust and transparency

Increased communication leads to trust within the team–the more you know your team members, the more likely you are to trust them. Standups help promote trust between employees by sharing a joint understanding of the responsibilities, objectives, and outcomes within the team. They promote transparency and (if done well) should provide a safe space for team members to share concerns openly.[/et_pb_text][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.16″ _module_preset=”default” global_colors_info=”{}”]

4. Measures progress

Measuring progress is critical for Agile teams. One of the 12 principles of Agile states, “Users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” Daily reports provide assessments for the team–analyzing where everyone is on any given day. It’s easy to track blockers or improvements and adjust accordingly.Jell allows you to track if goals were achieved and allows each team member to indicate how well each goal was accomplished.Getting started only requires the ability to type. You can enter goals, sub-goals, or milestones, and even assign a specific timeframe. The goal is then published to your team and your extended organization.Measuring progress helps you and your team stay on track with your goals. The information helps you make or adjust plans of acting to get back on track. Measurements guide you toward your goal.

5. Timesaving

Ever go to a meeting that should have been an email? Us too. And everyone you know probably has too. Daily standup meetings are supposed to be short and succinct, taking up no more than 15 minutes of your morning. Gone are the days of derailed meetings, standups keep it simple by asking and answering those three short questions:

• What did you accomplish yesterday?
• What do you plan to accomplish today?
• What challenges stand in your way?

6. Readjusts priorities

Analyzing your progress means you know when and how to adjust your priorities during a sprint. Change is built into the agile process.Even if you have a small team, each member needs to work on the most important task at any given time. This is critical in not wasting time-solving problems that aren’t related to whatever sprint you’re in.Daily standups allow you to catch tiny problems like two team members working on the same task or an important task that no one is working on.Finally, you can re-adjust priorities. If your current task is taking longer than planned, it allows you to move around your team and use their resources strategically.

7. Reduces roadblocks

Issues in a company are inevitable. Bringing up your blockers during the team meeting allows the team to work on a solution together.Checking in daily means you can work out problems as a team.

8. Encourages positive collaboration

The more coworkers speak and spend time around one another, the more comfortable they are collaborating.Open communication is a key factor for an agile team and an important part of any great team.

9. Expands the team’s project knowledge

With standups, everyone on the team knows exactly what everyone else is doing. It promotes curiosity and asking questions about everyone’s project. Knowing about everyone’s project also means you know what everyone on your team is doing. If you have a project, you need help on, you know the right people to go to.

Related Articles

Daily Scrum: The Tools, Methods, and Tips To Pull Them Off Successfully

How to Work Effectively with Daily Standups

How to Get Your Leadership Team on Track with Standups

 

The Daily Standup Meeting – Suggestions for Team Leaders

• Read all of the daily slack standup messages and follow up on any challenges immediately.
• Contribute your own daily standup for the team. This promotes transparency and openness with the team.

**Important Tip for Managers** Leaders need to acknowledge good work, even if it’s just w/ a quick emoji reaction — that helps team members know you’re paying attention, you appreciate accomplishments, and want people to continue to share their wins.

• Save Daily Slack Standups for Later Consideration. When you run through Slack for free, you’ll lose track of what people have said in the past and any progress team members have made (once your slack channel has hit the 10k messages which go a lot faster than you think it will).
• Consider Connecting Goals, Objectives & Key Results to Daily standups. Companies like Google are big on connecting daily work (and standups) with quarterly and long-term goals to encourage smart work. This is a productive goal for the rest of us to live up to.

You can read more about OKRs in this ebook we put together. You’ll especially enjoy it if you are striving to get more important work done on your team.We are biased, of course, but we love using Jell for daily standup meetings and OKRs, since our Jellbot works in Slack team members can submit their standups right in Slack, and the Jell dashboard helps team members focus on the right objectives and key results.Here’s a peek at what it looks like:

The Daily Standup Meeting – Convince The Team To Participate

One of the most common problems with daily standup meetings is getting the entire team to participate. There always seems to be that one person who doesn’t like this seemingly ‘Big Brother’ approach.It’s a shame team members see it this way because it all comes down to perspective. They are looking at it as being micromanaged, but that’s not at all what standups are about.You must make sure you share your vision with them about how their life will be easier with fewer blockers and more collaboration.It’s sometimes difficult to get the whole team on board for a new tool or process, but it can be done, and in this case, it makes a big impact on the effectiveness of your team. Try it out, and use some of our tips, we have a lot of experience and want to help.Additionally, if you have any suggestions for others around daily standup meetings, we are all ears. Leave a comment below, and we’ll edit this article to include it.A focused team gets impressive results. Help your team focus on daily standup meetings, objectives, and key results.  

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