4 Reasons Why a Written Stand-up Meeting is Better

‍

Getting 10 people together for a meeting is not a big deal. Except when they’re not in the same location. Or even in the same time-zone. Imagine doing that daily, for a 15-minute check-in. Sounds challenging, right?

A quick meeting usually has a hidden cost higher than the one stated.

You don’t want to start anything too big just yet because it then will be interrupted by the meeting, so you end up doing things that are not too urgent, or just scrolling Instagram. Then the meeting starts 5–10 minutes late while everyone gets to the room or joins the call, and ultimately you take some time to get back in the zone after the meeting has finished.

A 15-minute meeting ends up costing 30–40 mins of every team member. For a 10-person team, this means wasting 20 hours of your team every week 🤯

1. Time Effectiveness

Every morning at 8 AM, DailyBot pings me on Slack asking me if we should start our daily check-in now. Sometimes I answer immediately, but there are times when I’m busy with another meeting, on my way to the office, or let’s be honest, I haven’t even woke up.

I know I have a window of 2 hours after he has asked me to reply with a Yes, and then be asked the 3 core questions of a daily stand-up meeting: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? What is getting in your way?

Compared to a sync meeting, answering these 3 questions usually takes me less than 3 minutes. That’s a 10x improvement 🚀

2. Asynchronous Check-ins

If I haven’t replied by 10 AM, DailyBot posts the team report to our #daily Slack channel and tags me making sure everybody notices I didn’t do it and helping our HR team charge me with $1 for the missed daily check-in.

The team report also includes the answers of our fellow teammates spread across Madrid, NYC, Pereira, Bogotá and Medellín so everyone can read what all the team is up to. They were all asked to complete their report earlier when their work day was starting.

3. Transparency & Info Accuracy

When answering to a chatbot, you don't have the pressure of wasting your team’s time so you can actually think and remember what things you did the day before and what you are up to now. You also feel more comfortable sharing any problem you are having at the moment, whether it is something that depends on others work, or something personal that is reducing your productivity like getting the flu.

4. Having a Record

Having a record for you team’s daily stand-up meetings can be useful in many ways, these are just some of them:

1. Remembering what you did yesterday: Most of the times the what-did-you-do-yesterday question is just a copy-paste of the what-will-you-do-today question of yesterday
2. Diagnose the productivity of your team. Going through your teammate’s reports, you can easily find out who has been working for days in the same task, which problems are the most common ones, who is super pumped completing to-do’s, etc
3. Evidence. In cases when you feel someone is not being as productive as he should be, you can just go through their daily reports and find out what he has been up to the last days

Reading this post took you 4 mins, that’s more than what it takes you completing your daily report and reading through your team’s.

If you are keen on trying written daily stand-up meetings, we’ve built a tool for our team and have now opened it to others. DailyBot is a chatbot that easily integrates with Slack, Google Chat or Microsoft Teams, and helps your team do async daily check-ins. Get it for free

‍