A stand-up is a super quick daily meeting with your team, where everyone must stand-up. The reason behind the standing up part is to keep the meetings short and sweet. Make them no longer than say 15 minutes, and the team leader should ask a few specific questions.
Here at Appifany, we hold a 10 minute daily stand-up at 10:10AM everyday. It gives the team leader an opportunity to check in with their team quickly and concisely each day. Sometimes you could go days without checking what you're fellow colleagues are up to. But in a startup environment, which is usually pretty tight knit or in the early stages anyway, so it's important to keep everyone on the same page and up to date.
Some businesses prefer to have stand-ups at the very start of the day before the real work starts, but if you're a bit more creative like we are, make it interesting like 10 minutes at 10:10AM.
The team leader asks each of the team members three questions:
What did you accomplish yesterday? We use this question to keep everyone accountable to tasks they commit to. If you say your going to do something today and you haven’t by tomorrow you broke your promise.
What’s on for today? We use this question to make sure everyone in the team is aligned with what others are doing. Do we have clashed meetings or is someone taking half a day off? Get each team member to grab out their phones and literally read out what meetings are booked in their calendar. If the answer is “not much”, then try and balance workloads in the team.
Are there any impediments? We use this to let team members flag any issues they’re having and what’s holding them back, then we all try and help remove these impediments.
This is the format for standups in a nutshell, but there’s a few things you should keep in mind when you’re running the standup.
Keep everyone honest.
If someone mentioned achieving something yesterday, but say they need to achieve it today ask why that’s the case.
Keep responses short and enforce this rule with the team.
Think about response as status updates; they should be in line with “I’m doing X, Y and Z for A client” not “I’m doing X,Y and Z for A client because X reason”.
Capture comments and impediments when they are raised, but don’t discuss them.
The standup is not the time for discussion. Try saying “I’ve noted that and we will chat about that after the standup”. Or "After this, let's schedule a time today to sit down and discuss that further."
Good luck running your next standup and check out this great in-depth guide to standups here.
//For more startup tips and tricks, check out more of our articles such as this one: Appifany Guide: How To Watch Your Burn Rate as a Startup.