How to Lead Virtual Daily Standups With Confidence

Daily standup meetings have become a ritual for many teams, especially those using the Scrum methodology. Daily standups can help everyone stay on the same page and communicate more effectively—but these types of team meetings can quickly turn into a time drain if they aren’t run effectively. 

So, here are some standup meeting best practices so you can lead your team’s daily standups with confidence!

What is a Daily Standup Meeting?

A daily standup meeting, also known as a scrum meeting, is a daily get-together that helps teams sync up and prepare to have a productive day. This type of team meeting is typically capped at 15 minutes (although this may need adjusting depending on the size of the team). 

What are the Benefits of Daily Standups?

There are many benefits to daily standup meetings, which is why they’ve become so popular amongst modern teams! Daily standups can create higher performing teams by making it possible to: 

• Track each team member’s progress on their list of priorities 
• Identify obstacles to productivity 
• Clarify objectives and goals
• Ensure that everyone is working towards those same goals together
• Stay focused on a shorter window of time, preventing employees from feeling overwhelmed 
• Encourage team communication
• Foster collaboration  
• Empower team members to feel comfortable bringing up issues and asking each other for support

Example of a Daily Standup Agenda

The great thing about daily standup agendas is that they’re short and dialed-in. In fact, only three core topics should be discussed at your daily standup meetings. Your daily standup agenda should include asking participants to go around and answer the following questions:

1. What did I do yesterday? Have each team member share their progress on what they worked on the day before, focusing on the activities that are relevant to the overall goals and initiatives of the team.
   
   
2. What am I doing today? Next, each team member should cover all the things they plan to accomplish that day—knowing they’ll be held accountable to give a progress report on those tasks in tomorrow’s daily standup meeting.
   
   
3. Are there any obstacles impeding my progress? Each team member should voice if they have any concerns about their task list for the day. This includes any cross-departmental dependencies, technical limitations, and lack of resources. 

Yup, that’s it! Any items that will take longer than a few minutes to discuss should be addressed after the daily standup meeting.

How Can You Run More Effective Daily Standups? 

There are clearly many benefits of daily standups—but there can also be some pitfalls, too. 

In our digitally-driven, hyper-connected world, the way we work has changed. More and more companies offer remote work policies, which means employees are often working on the go.

With this working model, daily standups can easily become a waste of time. When everyone has to stop what they're doing and get on a live call or meet live, it can quickly become distracting. It’s even more challenging to get everyone together for a live daily standup if team members are off-site in client meetings, living in different time zones, getting work done on a flight, etc. Plus, if someone is off for the day or out sick, they won’t get a chance to hear what was talked about in the daily standup meeting.

So, how is it possible to lead daily standups that are actually effective—rather than distracting—in our modern working world? By going digital! You can make the most of your team’s daily standups by using a reliable team meeting software, and Strety is the solution you’ve been looking for. 

Instead of having live daily standups that interrupt the flow of people's workday each and every day, you can ask those three questions from our daily standup agendas via a virtual check in within Strety. Through our all-in-one performance management and people management product, you’ll also be able to: 

• Set up the questions you want to ask and send them to your whole team at once 
• Store and send notes on each employee’s responses from your virtual daily standup meeting 
• Track progress and goals
• Use team message boards to make virtual communication simple
• Create discreet automated reminders for recurring tasks and questions
• Keep all your notes, action items, and progress benchmarks in one organized place 
• And more! 

Keep Track of Your Standups in Teams

Daily standup meetings are designed to be short, focused, and engaging—resulting in more seamless team cohesion and project management. If you're collaborating with your team in Microsoft Teams, shouldn't standups live there, too? Strety is the team meeting software that can make this possible.

With Strety, you can collaborate on agendas, make note of decisions, and add context to goals -- all within Microsoft Teams.

Contact us to book a tour or to ask any questions you may have about our performance management product for modern teams!