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Daily Standup Meetings & Everything You Need to Know

Stand up calls? A meeting in which participants frequently participate. The sessions are meant to be brief because standing for extended amounts of time is uncomfortable.

stand up calls

Stand up calls should adhere to a few fundamental guidelines. However, they can only discuss specific achievements, goals, and blocks break up in under 15 minutes.

The team gathers for daily standups, which are essentially status update meetings, to stay in sync, communicate progress, and resolve pressing problems.

Team leaders (and scrum masters) need the daily stand up calls to understand each team member’s efforts.

Stand up calls are still necessary to keep everyone on the same page.

Stand up calls are common agile rituals, particularly for engineering and development teams.

This routine promotes team alignment, progress sharing, accountability, and speedy problem-solving.

Stand up calls also promote accountability in a company.

Also, teams may unify around what is happening in the business, schedule their daily tasks accordingly, and remove roadblocks by holding regular stand up calls.

Stand up calls aims to keep everyone on the same page regarding which team member completed specific tasks. That way, your team stays aligned with its goals.

Stand up calls improve productivity by making communication effective and meetings more efficient.

Stand up calls also focus on frequent status updates to promote transparency of each team member to the goals of the project and the company

What is a Standup Call?

Stand up call, also known as the daily standup, is a daily meeting in which everyone is standing.

It enables your team to get together to share updates, establish daily priorities, and seek assistance with any roadblocks.

An incentive to keep the meeting brief and to the point is provided by standing rather than sitting down.

Purpose of Daily Standup Calls

A standup is intended to bring teams together to communicate developments, identify roadblocks, and advance work.

It’s about developing accountability among team members. However, it is a meeting that directly contributes to getting things done swiftly and smoothly.

This should be clear to everyone taking part in the standup so that they can all benefit from their time together.

Only 8% of team leaders are inherently strong at aligning strategy with execution, but standups help teams do just that.

3 Daily Standup Call or Scrum Meeting Questions

The three daily standup call or scrum meeting questions are:

  • What did you do the day before?
  • How are you spending today?
  • Anything preventing your advancement?

Here’s an illustration of how to answer these standup questions:

  1. What did you do the day before?
    I spent yesterday completing the slack project’s specifications.
  2. How are you spending today?
    I’m still helping Queen from development today to ensure that the slack project is progressing.
  3. Is anything preventing your advancement? Queen and I could use another set of eyes on the technical brief I’ve drafted.

While the three cornerstone questions help give structure and purpose to any standup, team leaders searching for additional strategies to keep standups as efficient and effective as possible may find the following advice helpful:

  1. The standup should go no longer than 15 minutes.
  2. Be professional: This covers your arrival time, listening to coworkers, and standing up for the meeting.
  3. Be valuable: Everything you say should be beneficial to at least most of the individuals taking part in the daily standup.
  4. Include distant team members: This will depend on the arrangement of the conference room and who started the meeting. At a specific time in the meeting, the facilitator (your scrum master) invites the remote team members to contribute.
  5. Visit the source: Before a daily standup (or even in instead of one), having a source of truth where team members can communicate blockers, plans, and works in progress can help teams focus their time on what matters most.

These talks might quickly happen after the meeting if you are only speaking to one other person or talking completely about yourself.

Teams can connect in context thanks to technological solutions like Range, which fully understand what and how everyone is doing.

What Does a Successful Standup Call Actually Entail?

  • Making the most of everyone’s time: It aids in the completion of each team member’s task without interfering with concentration time. The standup establishes a permission structure to discuss openly the obstacles to development.
  • Ensures honesty: This permission structure is especially crucial for those who might be reluctant to share information that might appear “bad” out of concern for the consequences.
  • It increases the output of your team: It truly boosts productivity, so it’s not just a chance to show the management what everyone is working on.
  • Avoid micromanagement: The behaviors of these managers are the exact antithesis of the standup principles of trust, self-regulation, and openness. These behaviors can be the result of a lack of trust, a need for control, or low self-esteem.

Benefits of a Daily Standup Call

  1. Greater team insight into in-flight work will enable teams to complete tasks more quickly and successfully.
  2. Enhance teamwork and communication across the board
  3. Encourage both team and individual responsibility.
  4. Assist a project team in completing its tasks more quickly.
  5. Ensure that teams and leadership can link strategy to execution.
  6. Quickly remove surface obstructions before they become a serious problem.

How to Conduct a Successful Daily Standup Call

If you’ve never participated in a daily standup call before, you might be curious about how to make the most of them.

The solution is to adhere to some fundamental guidelines. Here are some things to keep in mind to make daily standups successful:

  1. Who should attend: Daily standup meetings should be attended by every member of the team.
  2. Standup meetings should not last more than 15 minutes, in the ideal world.
  3. When to hold it: Try to schedule meetings for the same time at the start of each workday.

Say there are five people on your team, including you, Daniel, Richard, Queen, and Emmanuel.

Imagine that you and your team members are having a status meeting for the development team and that each member is taking turns outlining the tasks they are currently working on. Richard is now sharing his development, and you’re up next.

Are you actually paying attention to Richard, or are you more preoccupied with checking your Slack messages or preparing your response for when it’s your moment to speak?

The latter is more often the case, and while it’s not uncommon for folks to want to think things out before speaking in order to prevent saying something inappropriate, doing so regrettably destroys the goal of daily standups.


Asynchronous communication technology like Loom, which enables teams to record their responses so that other teammates may access them at their own time and speed, might be a simple solution to the strain of speaking in group meetings.

Members can quickly submit solutions to a teammate’s problems to the Loom’s comments.

Additionally, the timing of daily standups may be thrown off if the entire team is unable to huddle simultaneously.

Finding the ideal time to meet when juggling numerous schedules is a typical problem, especially in distant workplaces. Loom offers an agile solution.

Some Common Problems with Daily Standup Call

Have you ever gone to a standup meeting solely to report your work to higher-ups?

As more teams start using standups, many have the subdued impression that the meeting has turned into a roadblock. Some of the most typical mistakes are listed here.

  1. Reviewing the past (either because the attendee list is too large or because discussion or updates lose focus).
  2. Being distracted by side discussions.
  3. Sharing information that is only important to a certain group of people in the room Sharing information repeatedly over the course of several days.
  4. Absence of participation or attendance.
  5. Finding it difficult to schedule a meeting that suits everyone.
  6. Changing into a status update.

Daily Standups will Help you Become Agile

Daily standups enable team members to identify and resolve blockages before they become an issue, helping teams stay in sync and grow more agile.

Also, standup calls are a great approach to remove friction from workflows without spending a lot of time or money.

Furthermore, it’s crucial to make sure that the rest of the team benefits from a daily standup meeting.

Though it could be challenging for remote or hybrid teams to implement daily standups.

You can’t have a daily standup if one of the members isn’t there, but adopting an async platform like Loom for daily standups offers a perfect option.

How to Maintain Standups’ Effectiveness and Efficiency

When done incorrectly, stand up calls turn into yet another duty that clogs your team’s schedule. Treat standup meetings as an opportunity to fully utilize the power of cooperation rather than a succession of individual reports.

A standup meeting is a quick and efficient approach to ensure that everyone is on the same page and to motivate your team every day. Here are some suggestions for facilitating productive and focused meetings:

  • Keep your eye focused: individual progress should facilitate The overall project’s progress. When team members discuss their progress, make sure they keep this in mind.
  • From right to left, move across the board: Keep your eyes on the baton by concentrating mostly on what is almost finished and how to finish it.
  • Focus on the important things: Find the obstacles that are delaying the entire process. Use this time to discuss any hurdles you need to remove with your team in order to keep things moving. Don’t let small talk and brand-new topics divert the conversation; instead, allow for an in-depth discussion of the meeting’s most critical issues.
  • Deal with stale work: Even with work-in-progress restrictions, bottlenecks will still develop, and flow debt will mount. During standups, keep an eye out for the oldest things in your process. They should prioritize work items that are moving past the average cycle time for completion. According to aging charts that illustrate how much time each work item spends in the process and in each process state. While the task is still being completed, you can use the Aging chart to pinpoint where your process is slowing down.
  • Set the day’s priorities in agreement: It takes several people working together to complete related activities in the proper sequence to move your project ahead. Get everyone on the same page with regard to the day’s main objectives by using the daily standup.
  • Use conversational language: As a leader, your words have the potential to inspire or demoralize your people. Your team’s motivation is key to success, and the daily standup is an opportunity to keep them motivated.

Reasons for Standup Calls

There will inevitably be difficulties when two or more people must collaborate. Face-to-face contact can greatly reduce conflicts, and having daily stand-ups will benefit your team by:

  1. Keep the same perspective: The entire team must be informed of everything that is happening and how it affects the project in an agile project, where a lot might change from one sprint to the next.
  2. Be active with your group: you’ll be able to connect with your team members better if you spend time with them. Along with the nature of your work, your team’s personality and relationships impact team dynamics. Your team members must be able to relate to one another in addition to having mutual regard for one another.
  3. Giving back is caring: One brain is less efficient than two. It will considerably increase the efficiency of a team by knowledge sharing, whether they are addressing problems or improving an existing practice.

Best Practices for Standup Call

1. Invigorate your meetings: The Scrum master typically serves as the facilitator and selects the next speaker during team stand-up sessions.

This is an underhanded attack on self-organization.

Other options include using a round-robin procedure (which begins with a random person and proceeds either clockwise or counterclockwise), or a pass-the-token procedure (in which only the person holding the token may speak before tossing the token to a random person).

People frequently ignore the speakers until it is almost their turn when using predictable mechanisms like round-robin, whereas unpredictable mechanisms like pass-the-token keep the team on their toes.

2. Schedule your Stand up calls or meetings:
A stand-up call should go no longer than 15 minutes. Your stand-ups can start to lengthen as colleagues grow more at ease with one another.

A slow increase gets harder to see. Timing your calls and sharing the results with your team each day is a friendly approach to cut down on rambling or digression in your daily stand-ups.

3. Shuffle the board
Structure your stand-ups using your project management tool’s Scrum board rather than the three-question form.

The ones closest to deployment are those on the top-right side of the board, so you can start there. After that, work your way down and from “Done” to “To do.” In this way, the team’s overall success is the main focus rather than individual updates.

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Formats for Standup Calls

1. Beginning time: Choose a start time based on the local office time, the members’ availability, and the location of your remote standup meeting.

2. A brief exercise: Although it is entirely optional, doing this before leveling up their assignment work can be intimidating. Several businesses have used this to make meetings go more quickly and effectively.

3. Begin: Choose the participant who entered the conference room the last, or perhaps the one who is most in proximity to the videoconference or remote equipment.

4. Find the solutions: Each team member must have responses to the following inquiries within the allotted 30 to 60 seconds:

  • What did you do the day before?
  • How are you spending today?
  • Anything preventing your advancement?

5. Closing/end. Your remote daily standup meeting should come to a close with a team clap, a cheer, and a reminder of your company’s objective.

Senior executives should meet with the host of a remote daily standup, typically the project or account manager, once a month to discuss the meeting’s successes and failures.

After that, make an effort to streamline and improve the procedure and the plan by asking for input.

Things to Avoid During Standup Calls

1. Finding Solutions: An important objective of a daily stand-up is to identify obstacles; Nevertheless, this is not the time to solve problems.

It is possible to keep an improvement board where issues are noted as they arise. When the issue is acknowledged visually, the team is less inclined to discuss it in depth at the meeting.

As soon as an issue is discovered, a team member should be given the task of fixing it, and any more debates should be put on hold.

2. Low vigor: The pace of a meeting may decrease for a number of reasons, including the speaker rambling, unprepared attendees, or when everyone has finished speaking and there is an unpleasant silence.

Timing your meetings will help you avoid rambling. If your staff is not prepared, you may want to consider rescheduling the appointment to accommodate their schedule or consulting with them to determine whether a larger problem exists.

Come up with a phrase your team can shout in unison at the conclusion of your daily stand-up if you want to leave your meeting on a positive note.

3. Giving the leader a report: Team members often face the Scrum master when speaking when the Scrum master is the facilitator and the three-question template is used.

It may take the form of a group of people reporting to the facilitator rather than a meeting. People are more likely to engage with their team when the facilitator changes for each meeting.

The team members are positioned differently, or even something as simple as the facilitator purposefully breaking eye contact.

Frequently Asked Questions

A stand-up call is a team meeting organized on a daily basis to present a status update to all a development team’s members.

The daily stand-ups are necessary for team leaders (and scrum masters) to comprehend each team member’s efforts.

The daily stand-up meeting gives the project team a chance to talk in-depth about the development of a project.

StandUp discusses the problems that could jeopardize the Sprint objective while concentrating on getting outcomes that can be seen. Whenever it’s necessary to achieve the goal, the strategy is modified.
Updates on the current status, such as “the task is 80% complete,” are the main emphasis of status meetings. It’s unclear whether we will be able to produce business value by the end of the Sprint.

What did you do the day before? How are you spending today? What, if anything, is preventing your development?

  • Select the appropriate meeting cadence for your team.
  • Set a recurring time for the stand-up meeting.
  • Give every team member plenty of opportunities to contribute.
  • Have a distinct meeting leader.
  • Ensure it is brief.
  • Clearly state the meeting’s objectives.

Summary

A daily stand up call is an essential tool that can significantly improve team productivity and communication. Regardless of how simple or commonplace the activity is, it’s critical to understand why you’re doing it in order to carry it out properly.

In this way, stay aware of your daily scrum meetings, change things up with new exercises when you notice that the meetings are becoming a bit ritualistic, and frequently consider new ways to improve them.

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