What's a great alternative to the daily standup?
“We recently switched to fully remote, and love it! However, the one thing we are struggling with is the right format for our daily standup.
What can we do to make our daily standups great? Any tool, process, you would recommend? Or Is there an alternate of daily standup you have found?”
While there are a ton of standup tools out there, I'm of the mindset that you should only jump first to tools if you're looking to make something that is already working more efficient. In your case, standups aren't working, so we need to target the approach.
Daily standups tend not to work for remote teams because they are attempting to do too much. You're trying to fit status updates, blocker resolution, team alignment, and socialization into one 15-minute meeting. Check this out if you're interested in a detailed explanation of why this just doesn't work.
So what's the alternative? Unfortunately, there's no one-size-fits-all solution, so it depends on the team. To start, ask your team what they like and dislike about your current standups. The best people to tell you how to fix it are the ones dealing with it.
When I'm brought in as a Fractional COO for a new remote team, I often find that transitioning to a 'my-week' channel is a flexible and effective solution. At the beginning of the week, team members add their bulleted list of what was accomplished last week and what they plan on doing this week. Here's what that looks like:
This approach allows your team to:
Spend less time in meetings
Be able to provide updates in their own time
Build increased accountability
The trick here is to copy the 'This week' items in the following week and add emojis to indicate whether they were completed or not. This helps everyone level up in personal planning. Usually, people forget what they promised and only realize their actual completion rate once they write it down like this. When people have to call out when they're overloaded/blocked and why, everyone ends up getting better at setting reasonable expectations.
It's also great for accountability because you have documented proof of what's getting done and not. As a manager, I end up being extra grateful for using this method because it acts as an easy reference when I do yearly reviews for team members and whenever I need to share specific details with my own managers on exactly what my team is accomplishing.
I've eliminated a LOT of standups using this method. This transition always has a positive response like this:
After a couple weeks with this simple format, I then gather feedback and update as needed. My biggest tip is to keep it simple in the beginning. When teams do a my-week channel and start packing in extras (like additional content or Slack plugins) before they're needed, it makes it very bloated and unhelpful from the start. You can always add on more later.
I love hearing about alternative methods people use instead of the traditional standup. Experiment and let me know what ends up working for you!
If you're looking for additional help implementing a daily standup alternative, book a coaching call here.
