This Simple Tool Can Help Your Team to Feel Connected During Remote Working

Daily standup meeting is one of the tools in Scrum methodology for project management. The idea is to have a short meeting (no more than 15 minutes) every day with the same agenda: what have been done, what will be done, is there any obstacles? The meeting should be conducted “standing up” to ensure that the meeting will not go on too long.

I always had some reservation in employing this tool. Mandating daily meeting just seemed too excessive. I was afraid the meeting would just become distraction to the team. However, it turned out, the daily standup became an indispensable tool for Work From Home reality that a lot of us are experiencing.

When we worked in the office, we often had informal conversation with our colleagues. Sometimes they were work-related, sometimes they were not. Regardless, these small interactions helped to build a sense of belonging in the team. This feeling is lost in remote working arrangement where you need to purposely set-up a meeting to talk with your colleague.

Having a daily meeting where all teams must attend, therefore, became a sort of substitute for that. The meeting helps us to still feel connected with the team. It helps to remind us that we are not working alone.

Having said that, a meeting is still a meeting. It would take away time from doing your “core” works, especially if it is not managed well. Here are some things to note if you decide to have a daily standup meeting:

1. Discipline in managing the time. Since technically you are no longer “standing up”, there is nothing holding back the meeting to overrun. (Even in a real daily stand up, the meeting can still overrun). Remember, the daily standup is only to update the status, it is not a place for deep discussion or brainstorming session. When a discussion on a topic is taking too long, somebody needs to be able to park the discussion for separate meetings. As a project manager, I often fell victim in going too deep on certain topic, so it is important for every team member to remind each other about this.
2. Writing down the key discussion is a great way to make all the team members accountable to what they plan to do. Words are wind, but writing them down helps to make them more real (if that makes sense). I use a cloud service called “Confluence” (it’s a wiki software) to consolidate all of the points in the standup in one page for that Sprint. Write the minutes “live” during the meeting so you would not need to think about it afterward. (Minutes of meeting is often forgotten). You don’t need to use Confluence, any document cloud service will do. All team members can write the discussion points on their respective projects / tasks in the same document. I like to consolidate all things related to the sprint in one big confluence page. This includes sprint planning, daily stand-up and sprint retrospective.
3. Consider the best timing for your team. Typically, the standup is conducted at the start of a working day. In my team’s case, we found it is best to have the standup toward the end of the day. The reason is because morning’s meeting does not agree with everyone. And so we found late afternoon meeting is most suitable for our team.
4. Please for the love of God, just do this once every day. I heard of teams who do both “check-in” (start of day) and “check-out” (end of day) meetings each day. Remember, your job is to deliver the project, not attend meetings.
5. Make small talk. Ergh, I know. I didn’t like small talk, in fact, I still don’t. However, with no face-to-face interaction for more than one year, I found some comfort in having informal, light conversation with my colleagues. And how else can you do that if not during meetings? I don’t do it all the time; that would become tedious fast. But I like to remind myself every now and then to ask everybody how are they doing, have you watched that new TV shows, have you heard about that gossips, etc.

I am not sure whether this meeting is still needed once we all could work from office. From my experience, face-to-face meeting had more tendency to overrun: you have to wait everybody to arrive at the meeting room, then since everybody is there, it seems rude to end the meeting in five minutes when there is not much to discuss. In virtual meeting, I feel less guilty to end meetings early. And people tend to come to virtual meetings on time for obvious reason. Perhaps a small huddle in the vicinity of the workspace could be a good compromise. Or perhaps most of us in the tech world would continue to work from our home even when the pandemic is over.