How can I make standup work for my remote and distributed team?
Short answer: ditch the sync meeting. And you might consider ditching standup altogether.
Standup can be disruptive for your team even in the best case, where everyone is co-located in the same office. The more your team is dispersed, the more disruptive it gets, and the suck factor starts going through the roof.
Within the same time zone: a sync standup meeting interrupts people who have different naturally productive times. I’m a lark, and I can easily get twice as much done in half the time before 10am. A standup meeting at 9am is just killer for folks like me. Folks who prefer later mornings will grumble about needing to be “on” for a meeting that doesn’t give them much value.
If your team spans time zones or even continents, syncronous standup has little value. It’s not useful as an afternoon meeting for folks in later time zones, and then you have a mixed discussion of what people plan to do and what they did while they waited for their coworkers to come online. What’s worse is that blockers are surfaced to the team at potentially inconvenient times where it might take a whole business day cycle to get something addressed because of the way time zones line up.
What to do instead
Rely on your tooling for status reports, not standup. If you can’t see at-a-glance info about the status of a project, use the time you would have spent in standup to improve the way your team plans projects, scopes out work, or makes that work more trackable in whatever tool you need.
Surface blockers immediately. Standup is most useful for raising blockers, but can introduce unnecessary delays if your team doesn’t have open communication through the rest of the workday. Don’t wait until standup to let the team know you’re blocked.
Do find time for the team to connect in other meaningful ways. Standup can be useful because it’s a way to introduce a little “human time” to your routine. Your team will benefit from contact time and interaction, so find a way to inject that into other meetings, or create space for social interaction sometime during the sprint.
Consider async standup. If it’s just too painful to say goodbye to standup altogether, there are a couple decent async standup tools for Slack like GeekBot, or even Slack’s own tool.
Don’t ditch syncs altogether. This isn’t about being dogmatic about ditching all meetings. When you have a good reason to meet to talk about the project, go for it.
Have a Management Query? Let me know at questions@lauratacho.com or on Twitter.
