Remote work is here to stay and companies from all around the world were quick to adopt daily meetings as a way to simplify workflows and optimize daily routines. Daily standup meetings are an effective solution for teams to stay together, connected, and on-track with their goals, as they help to plan the day’s work.
Simply put, a daily standup or a “daily Scrum” (a reference to the Scrum framework) is a 15-minute time-boxed recurring event in which teams talk, discuss, and plan for the next 24 hours.
These team meetings are held as a way to solve a problem or a particular set of problems. Daily standups help keep people on track, and on-sync with their work, by sharing particular points of view of a team’s progress. They get their name from the fact that people tend to participate while standing up as a way to keep them short.
How Can Companies Benefit From Daily Standups?
Typically, standup meetings were mostly reserved for engineering teams, but it seems now they’ve rapidly grown in popularity after more and more companies had to quickly adapt to remote work. Daily standups became useful for all sorts of teams, from all around the globe.
And the truth is, daily standups can benefit everyone because they help people work more effectively together by sharing action plans, understanding each other’s goals, and discussing possible roadblocks. So, what are the main benefits of adopting daily standups meetings?
Collaboration. They promote conversation and collaboration between team members. By holding daily meetings, your teammates will have the opportunity to discuss issues, ideas, and possible roadblocks. Daily meetings ensure your team has knowledge of what everyone’s working on and this helps to keep the information flowing.
Sharing goals. Daily standups help keep the conversation going and they provide a place for your team to discuss and internalize goals related to a project. Also, by discussing them, you’ll be making sure your teams fully understand each other’s goals and objectives.
Reducing roadblocks and bottlenecks. They also allow team leaders to identify issues before they become problematic. Why? Because as team members discuss tasks on which they are feeling a bit stuck, other team members can offer help or ideas on how to tackle the difficulties.
As a rule of thumb, daily standup meetings should stick to the 15-minutes format and they should focus on having everyone answer the same 3 questions:
What they have accomplished since the last meeting.
What they’re going to be doing today.
Are there any impediments or roadblocks keeping them from moving forward or completing tasks.
Here are some additional tips to quickly organize effective daily standup meetings:
Set a time and commit to it.
Follow a clear agenda.
Always stick to the same format.
Instagantt and Daily Standup Meetings
In order for stand-up meetings to be effective, they need to be recurring events. As such, it’s ideal to have a go-to format. By using the same mechanism daily, your team will be synchronized and up-to-date with what everyone else is doing. A great way to simplify your workflow and optimize your daily meetings is to work with a template. And this is exactly where a Gantt chart software like Instagantt can help you.
Instagantt specializes in creating Gantt charts, which can be very helpful when organizing work and on-going projects. Instagantt allows you to create an agenda in a format that’s very clear for everyone to understand, and thanks to its unique collaboration features, you can create and assign tasks to team members, allowing you to follow up on their work on a daily basis.
You can also set deadlines and write specific comments and descriptions on any tasks, which can be of great help when dealing with possible bottlenecks and roadblocks because everyone can revisit and add information on how to collaborate and help each other.
By creating your own format, you’d be setting up your team for success. Use Instagantt when performing daily standup meetings to review and discuss the results of the previous day’s work, and create action plans for any possible scenario.
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