Getting rid of daily stand-ups

Every 6 months we conduct an audit of our company culture at Criclabs. This involves trying to gauge team morale, employee engagement, and pruning our ceremonies.

Ceremony pruning involves asking existential questions to every ceremony we have set up, and being decisive in dropping ones that don’t work while improving ones that do.

Very early on in our company’s founding, we got rid of daily stand-up meetings.

Here’s the why we did it and how we’ve replaced it with something more productive for us.

What daily stand-ups were meant to be

Daily stand-up meetings were meant to be short, structured meetings lasting no longer than 15 minutes.

They’re traditionally used in agile project management and adopted by start-ups, tech firms, and later on, by digital agencies.

The daily stand-up (aka daily scrum) has three main rules:

1. The meeting had to be no longer than 15 minutes
2. Everyone has to actively participate
3. The meeting is held at the same time everyday

Goals

“I want teams emerging from that meeting saying things like, “Let’s nail this. Let’s do this.” - Jeff Sutherland, Co-Creator of Scrum

Apart from building team morale, stand-up meetings are also supposed to keep everyone on the same page, synchronize efforts, identify challenges, and facilitate quick decision-making.

Format

Daily stand-up formats can be different from one organization to another, but they generally involve each member updating their peers on three key questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• What blockers stand in your way?

Why daily stand-ups fail

Stand-up meetings mostly fail to achieve it’s goals because rules 1 and 2 are broken.

• Rule 1: The meeting had to be no longer than 15 minutes
• Rule 2: Everyone has to actively participate

Rule 1: The meeting runs way longer than 15 minutes

There’s a direct positive correlation between team growth and daily stand-up meeting times.

With smaller teams of 3-5 members, it’s easy to stay within 15 minutes. But as team sizes start to get added to 8-10, stand-up times can easily double to 25 - 30 minutes each day.

Imagine having to stand for 25 minutes everyday, where less than half of the agenda is relevant to you. It’s breeding ground for disengagement, leaving employees feeling drained and exhausted without getting anything done.

Advocates will often suggest that as team members grow, stand-ups should be reorganized into smaller groups. But a lot of the times, this simply isn’t realistic for two key reasons:

1. Team organization and project involvement calls for bigger gatherings than just 3-5
2. Topics under discussion can lengthen stand-up times even with smaller groups

Rule 2: The meeting is dominated by 1-2 people

Stand-ups can quickly become dominated by 1-2 people, often by team leads or managers who feel obligated to ‘take charge’.

When this happens, stand-ups turn into a circle where people simply stand and listen to others speak on topics that aren’t immediately relevant to them.

This issue can be fixed with proper communication and a team lead who understands how to give space for less outspoken members to share.

But whether these issues get resolves will be dependent on one underlying question:

• Who’s the daily stand-up really for at this point?

Who’s the daily stand-up really for?

When daily stand-ups are failing to achieve it’s original goals, this begs the question: “Then what goals do these meetings achieve?”

This is when stand-ups can revert from being bottom-up to top-down.

In other words, they can become a tool for insecure managers to ‘keep their team in check’, with the goal of the stand-up changing to simply each employee taking turns to report to their managers on their tasks.

This goes against our core values of trust and ownership, so we’ve decided to drop ‘traditional stand-ups’ all together.

Introducing automation and asynchronicity

We’re trying to solve three pain points we’ve found in how ‘stand-up’ meetings have been implemented in other organizations. These are:

1. Disengagement: We were eager to step away from a work culture where stand-up meetings feel forced and draining.
2. Management centric: Often, daily stand-ups weren’t for the benefit of our team. Instead, it was to feed management team’s insecurity and it became a tool to ‘keep tabs’ on our team. If we needed to do that in the first place, we’ve failed in building a healthy, productive, self-motivated team.
3. Time-wasting: Why spend 15+ minutes each day when we can reduce this to just 3 minutes? Instead of having daily small meetings that always go overtime, we have one bigger, well-prepared, high engagement meeting instead.

That’s why we’ve introduced automated, asynchronous stand-up routines instead, via Slack-Geekbot integration. Here’s what it looks like.

Each members are given a prompt 30minutes after logging on each day, asking them three simple questions:

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Any blockers?

After answering each question with short bullet points, the updates are then shared with others on our ‘stand-up’ channel.

Here’s what this format helps us achieve:

1. Aligns with our flexible hours policy. People can start work whenever they want, as long as they deliver quality work on time.

*Some businesses say they have ‘flexible working hours’ but imposes mandatory 9am stand-ups everyday. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not flexible hours and shouldn’t be advertised as such.

2. Keeping it under 2 minutes. It takes less than 2 minutes to answer these three questions.

3. Achieving the minimum. It effectively aligns the team on who’s doing what. No more, no less.

What about human interaction?

Part of the ‘daily stand-up’ magic is the opportunity for human interaction it provides. This is the formula that gives the “Let’s nail this. Let’s do this” energy that Jeff Sutherland mentioned.

Coming out of the pandemic, we romanticize ‘human interaction’ as the magic ingredient that solves all problems employee-engagement problems.

But human interaction isn’t always beneficial.

Especially when ‘traditional stand-ups’ are not implemented properly, we’ve seen that this can do more harm than good.

How do we stop this from happening and make sure that we end up on the left half of this diagram?

Our answer is Weekly Breakout Sessions.

Here’s what the breakout sessions involve:

1. Everyone gathers and managers shares company-wide announcements/updates
2. Each team breaks out and does their status updates in groups of 5 or less
3. Teams regroup, nominating one person each week to update the rest of the company on key achievements / cross-team collaboration opportunities discussed

We’ve found this helps keep engagement levels high, as the breakout and regroup sessions keep people on their feet, breakout updates are only heard by relevant members, and the nomination process at the end helps cultivate a sense of camaraderie.

What’s next for our ceremonies?

In some ways, we still do some version of a stand-up meeting at Cric. But a much more streamlined version where we strip away synchronicity, proximity, and regularity.

We believe we’re able to achieve what ‘traditional’ versions of the stand-up meeting was supposed to, but in less time, requiring less effort, and leaving our team members feeling more engaged and energized.

At the end of the day, all our ceremonies are a work-in-progress. Nothing is safe from being pruned. But we’re also early adopters and we’re always open to try something new. Looking ahead, we’ll continue to adapt and improve our ceremonies to suite our remote-first environment.