How to Run a Remote Daily Stand Up Meeting to Boost Work Efficiency

Does a daily stand up meeting work with distributed teams? Jenna Bunnel of Dialpad answers this question, debunking a notion of stand up meetings being the attribute of an office realm. Read on to learn how to conduct a remote daily stand up meeting to fuel your team’s productivity.

While meetings can be a great tool for improving office productivity, they’re often unpopular, and people resent preparing for them. But, before you decide to cancel every meeting on your agenda, take a step back and reassess. What can you keep that might be useful, and what can you get rid of? 

Often, when teams head into formal meetings they might expect to be judged on their input, resentful of agenda items that aren’t relevant, or thinking about all the work they could be doing if the meeting wasn’t happening. So, start by changing up how you host meetings.

This is where standups come in — short, informal gatherings in the office to check in with one another. They’re quick, they’re to-the-point, and they’re incredibly useful from a management point of view. As well as keeping teams connected, they’re also fantastic for building motivation, focus, and team culture.

While the name ”standup” might make you think they need to be done in person, they work just as well remotely. You might need to make a few changes to ensure they run smoothly, but luckily, that’s what this guide all about.

Acknowledge That Remote Stand Up Meetings Are Different

Treating the online format the same as an in-office meeting is a surefire way to fail before you even begin. If you treat a remote stand up like an in-person meeting, you risk triggering all the weaknesses of the remote format while completely neglecting its strengths.

For example, remote working has great advantages in reducing that “meeting mindset.” People don’t have to commute, and they don’t have to worry so much about their presentation. Besides, you can even attend a meeting without being seen if you need to — great for the self-conscious. It’s also much easier to take ten minutes out of your day for a quick call, compared to having to pack up your work, head to a different space, and then hope everyone else is on time too!

On the other hand, sometimes the tech really is to blame. Connection issues, glitchy audio or software problems can mean that things get lost. Similarly, a lot of the communication that people take for granted doesn’t work remotely. When talking face-to-face, most people use something that Scandinavians call “conversational humming” (making noises like “mhm” and so on to indicate that we’re listening to what someone is saying). 

With the microphone on, “conversational humming” can confuse the software into thinking that you are the principal speaker. With the microphone muted, the speaker finds themselves speaking in total blank silence. It’s likely you won’t realize how much you rely on conversational humming as a speaker until it’s not there. Learning to display visual cues — nodding, looking at the camera to imitate eye contact, or otherwise showing attentiveness — is vital.

By acknowledging these challenges upfront, you can ensure your meetings run more smoothly, and your team doesn’t feel disconnected from what you’re discussing.

Use the Tech to Your Advantage

Remote working has a lot of benefits. One of those benefits is that everyone in your meeting is (hopefully) already using a fantastic array of tech. For example, rather than everyone leaning forward to squint at a projector screen, a virtual whiteboard app gives everyone a clear and uninterrupted view of presentations.

There’s a lot of potential to up your tech game with managing a remote workforce. A remote daily stand up meeting is a great place to start. During your standups, make full use of things like project management apps like Asana, time trackers like My Hours, Google drives, breakout chats, presentation software, and so on. 

Another great advantage of remote meetings is that the software may give you the option to transcribe the conversations. This saves you from having to take minutes and makes it very easy for people to check the meeting notes if they’re not sure about something. All in all, you can give your remote standup meetings a huge boost if you take advantage of the tools and tech available to you. 

Stick to the Point

The big advantage of a remote standup is that it’s fast, and it gets to the point. Try and narrow your agenda down to two or three items – for example:

Imagine you’re currently working on bringing down customer acquisition costs. Your meeting might take maybe 10-20 minutes to establish how costs stand at the moment, what you still need to do to reduce them, what’s hindering you in doing this, and how you can move forward. Then wrap it up and hang up.

This is worth stressing because it’s not always as simple as it sounds. It’s often easier in a physical context to get a meeting done and wrapped up in good time. You can see people fidgeting to get on with their work, for example. Those cues are less obvious in a remote setting — so it’s vital to understand when the meeting is complete and not prolong it unnecessarily.

Cultivate Trust

What’s more, in a physical setting, managers can see that team members are leaving the meeting and beginning their allotted tasks. You can’t do this (at least, not to the same extent) when your team is working remotely. As a manager, this can be a bit disconcerting. Timing is one of the most difficult things to get your head around when managing remote workers. When you can’t directly see people doing their work, you have to rely on things like trust and maybe some time management tools and techniques to keep productivity on track. 

It can be tempting to dig deep into your team’s schedules and processes during your standup meetings. Quite simply: don’t. Micromanaging is a simple way to make your team feel like you don’t trust them. As a result, it’ll quickly lead to people dreading their daily standups. As long as the work gets done on time and to the standard expected, everything is fine. You may even find that productivity goes up without the need for you to micromanage!

On the other hand, it can be tempting to want to boost team bonding and trust through a bit of chit-chat. That might be great for team bonding, but too much is unproductive. Use your meeting to make sure that everyone knows where they are and what they’re doing, and then trust them to get on with it. You can schedule other times or activities for more casual talk, but keep the daily standup productive and to the point.

Remote Standup Meetings Can Be Incredible for Productivity – If You Play to Their Strengths

Standup meetings are incredible tools for building teams, improving collaboration skills, and pushing projects to completion. However, if you try to run a remote standup meeting in the same way you would an in-person standup meeting, you’re doing the format a disservice.

It’s important to remember that a remote context is very different from a physical context. Not worse — just different. So, use its strengths to your advantage. For example, use screen and document sharing to actually see what your team members have been doing in a way that you can’t in a physical standup meeting.

Also, remember to trust your team members. If things aren’t going the way they need to, use your remote standup meeting to get things back on track — but don’t waste time micromanaging your team. The point of a standup meeting is that it’s short, functional, and stress-free. Keep it that way, and you’ll maintain all that great momentum and boost productivity into the bargain.

Author Bio

Jenna Bunnell is the Senior Manager for Content Marketing at Dialpad, an AI-incorporated conference call services and voip service providers for valuable call details for business owners and sales representatives. She is driven and passionate about communicating a brand’s design sensibility and visualizing how content can be presented in creative and comprehensive ways.