Daily Standups are a common type of business meeting designed to help teams sync up on what is happening in the business.
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Why Daily Standups?
Daily standups are short, simple status updates no longer that 15 minutes.
They are not decision making or discussion meetings.
They are not about “imposing the will of management” on the team or anything silly like that.
You run standups within teams or across the entire team if you’re a small team of less than 12.
If you have a larger team, you want to do standups in each of your departmental teams, then do a “standup of standups”.
This is a “round up” standup meeting with the managers of each departmental team. e.g., the head of marketing, head of ops, head of sales etc.
Business Owners and Daily Standups
Some business owners don’t like to do daily standups.
By and large this is because they don’t like the idea of having to show up at a specific time at a specific place and be responsible to their team and business.
If you’re one of those business owners — you may want to think about this carefully. A large part of business in the early stages is being a good servant leader and showing up for the team, regardless.
If you’re at stage where you’ve exited by management team, then it makes sense to have your CEO/COO run your daily standups.
I’m not saying that you can’t run a successful business without daily standups, of course you can. In fact, the popular methodology Traction recommends weekly updates instead of daily standups.
But work and projects will move substantially slower, your culture will not be as strong and there will generally be a lower sense of accountability across the business compared to if you ran a daily standup.
My recommendation is to do daily standups.
Daily Standup Principles
- If you’re in the office… do them standing up. This will minimise the length and waffling.
- If you’re remote, do your standups over voice, not video.1Video is tiring and draining for meetings, and is unnecessary for standups, even if all your other meetings are video meetings.
- If your team is spread across different timezones, you can group your standups by timezone instead of team, and have 2-3 different standups.
- Standups happen at the same time, every day and do not get cancelled if someone cannot attend.
The team (and you, as the business owner) are expected to show up and be accountable.
- There is to be no problem solving or discussion. This is a status update.
- There is to be no decision making. This is a status update.
- Any decisions or problems — take them offline.
- There is only ONE round in the standup.
It is run in a round-robin manner, where each person runs through the agenda, then the next person does until everyone is done.
Then the standup ends.
Agenda
The agenda that everyone runs through is simple:
- Good news.
- What happened in the last 24 hours?
- What is going to happen in the next 24 hours?
- Any updates on relevant numbers, metrics or KPIs?
- Any stucks? These are tabled for weekly issues or taken offline to solve.
An Example Daily Standup
Want to see an example of what a daily standup looks like?
Grab a snippet of me running a sample daily standup here:
What To Do Next
Grab the sample video above to see just how easy daily standups are to run in your business.
Then implement them for your team, starting this week.
If you need help, reach out to me here.
- Video is tiring and draining for meetings, and is unnecessary for standups, even if all your other meetings are video meetings.