Keep your colleagues motivated and inspired with daily random quotes. Motivating the team is likely to be high on your agenda. With Motivation, you can receive motivational quotes directly in any Slack channel. Thanks to Slack Help center, I'm able to set a reminder on specific days but not an all week days. My question is: How to set a single reminder on all week day? Something like this: /remind @channel 'It's time for daily stand up!' Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday at 11:45am. Nov 19, 2020 Learn how to set up recurring reminders in Slack, sending a notification to you or your team every week, month, 13th, or whatever interval you choose. Every day at a given time, a message is posted in a team channel with a reminder and instructions for posting a daily status update. Mentioning a team’s user group will notify everyone.
Most articles you’ll find about running standups remotely detail how to do it via video (i.e. Zoom). It seems logical: you normally do standups in person, looking at everyone’s faces, so why not do them remotely with a video call, also looking at everyone’s faces.
But posts about this topic often overlook the fact that video calls present several problems for remote teams who run daily scrums:
#1: Different Time Zones
Video standups require all team members to be there at the same time. But time zone and personal work schedule differences can make it difficult to schedule a daily meeting time that is convenient for everyone. This is especially true for larger teams (i.e. 12 people spread over 7 timezones).
#2: Takes Too Much Time
Video standups can run too long. Just like in-person standups, they often turn into lengthy problem-solving sessions. Or someone starts rambling about a trivial issue with no end in sight. So a 15 minute team meeting could turn into 30 minutes, leaving teammates frustrated since they just want to get back to work.
#3: Sitting Through Updates That Are Unrelated to Your Own Work
Standup attendees may have to sit through long updates that don’t apply to them (especially common in larger teams). For example, in an 8 person standup, someone may only need to hear an update from 2 people, not all eight. Naturally, folks get bored listening to info that doesn’t pertain to them. So they check out mentally for the rest of the meeting and stop listening or sharing. This of course cannibalizes the main benefit of standups: people getting in sync.
#4: Network Issues
It’s always frustrating when you experience internet connection issues during a video call. Folks keep getting disconnected from the meeting. And the audio may get so choppy that you can’t hear a teammate’s important update. So time is wasted… the teammate has to repeat the update again or just switch to chat if the connection doesn’t improve.
#5: Video Standups May Intimidate Introverts & Exhaust Them
Video standups can stress out introverts because they might not feel comfortable speaking in front of the whole team. They prefer sharing updates via text. Extroverts may leave video calls full of energy and excitement. But introverts could feel completely drained afterwards and no longer able to focus on meaningful work.
#6: Disrupts Workflow
Team members may have to stop working and break out of a flow to attend a video call standup that is set at a specific time. There’s nothing worse than getting in the zone while coding… and then having to drop everything you’re doing to attend a meeting.
We faced these problems ourselves before building Geekbot, a tool that lets teams run asynchronous standup meetings inside Slack.
Geekbot is actually our 4th startup as a team. Back in 2014, we were a team of 7 working remotely with no shared office.
We ran standups everyday via Zoom and there was a huge time cost involved in getting all 7 teammates on the same call at a specific time. Sometimes, it was just impossible due to calendar clashes & time zone differences. To add to that, we’d often get off track (i.e. water cooler chat or long code reviews) so our standup meetings would occasionally overrun by as much as 1 hour.
Clearly, standup video calls were a major pain point for us.
So we decided to build Geekbot for our own use. And eventually we released it to the public.
Since 2015, 60,000 users and companies like GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, Asana, and more have signed up for our Slack standup bot. Zapier even published a post on their blog about how their Strategic Apps team uses Geekbot everyday to run standups “in a timely manner” that is “minimally disruptive” (2 of the main reasons we also use Geekbot everyday ourselves).
In this post, we’ll show you how to run remote daily standups in Slack (via our product) and why it avoids the pitfalls listed above with video remote standups, making them more efficient & productive.
Table of Contents:
- Main Benefits of Running Daily Remote Standups in Slack (Instead of Video Calls)
Geekbot lets teams replace tedious in-person standups with efficient, transparent standup meetings in Slack. Learn more here and try it free for 30 days.
Logistics: How to Run Remote Daily Standups in Slack
Geekbot sends a direct message to standup participants in Slack, asking them to answer the 3 daily scrum questions:
- What did you do yesterday?
- What will you do today?
- Anything blocking your progress?
The team’s answers are then posted in a public Slack channel of your choosing:
This achieves the core goal of a daily standup: to quickly and efficiently get updates and blockers from everyone on the team.
Geekbot runs each participant’s standup asynchronously. You can set up Geekbot to contact standup members at their own respective time zones:
You can choose when to schedule your standups (period & days):
Everyone can answer the questions at any point during the day (not obligated to complete the standup at a specific, inconvenient time that disrupts your workday).
If standup participants forget to complete their answers, they can set up Geekbot to send them reminders in Slack (optional). Each member can choose their own follow-up reminder frequency:
We just briefly touched on the most essential parts of the tool. But Geekbot offers a lot more functionality, features, and customizable standup settings.
Below is a quick 4 minute video that shows how to create your first standup in Geekbot (also provides more detail on how the tool works):
Main Benefits of Running Daily Remote Standups in Slack (Instead of Video Calls)
#1. Shortens Standups
The main (and most obvious) benefit of running daily standups via Slack is that it shortens daily scrums.
The whole standup process usually takes a total of 5 mins or less in Slack. It’s efficient and concise. You just:
- Quickly type in your answers.
- View all your teammate’s standup answers in a public Slack channel.
- Skim long status updates instead of listening to every single word (like in video conferencing calls).
- Do a quick run-through and see which answers are relevant to you.
- Pitch in with a comment and open up a Slack thread if needed… Or move on with your day if the updates don’t have anything to do with you.
It’s a relatively quick process.
In comparison, most development teams we’ve spoken to complete video conference standups (e.g. Zoom) in 15 mins (on a good day). And meetings often overrun due to water cooler chat, code reviews, long decision making, unnecessary rambling, etc.
These long video calls add up over time, leaving folks less time for meaningful work.
#2. Side Discussions (Without Involving Every Single Teammate)
In Slack, you can have detailed, productive problem solving side discussions without wasting anyone’s time viathreaded conversation:
Folks can communicate with each other about a specific problem/roadblock that only involves them. The rest of the team doesn’t have to sit through & listen to discussions that aren’t relevant to their own work (like in video calls), but the team members dealing with an issue can still get into extended discussions to make progress on the issue.
In our view, it’s the best of both worlds. In the midst of an extended side discussion on a particular “blocker”, folks can also quickly get on a call to discuss more deeply.
#3. Asynchronous Meetings (Time and Location Agnostic)
As we mentioned earlier, you can go into Geekbot’s settings and choose the standup time and timezone:
Let’s say you configure the standup time to 12:25 PM but your team is spread across 4 different time zones. If you select “User’s local timezone”, then Geekbot will prompt teammates to answer questions at 12:25 PM in their own respective time zone.
That way, distributed teams don’t have to hop on video calls at odd hours that might be convenient for some folks, but inconvenient for others in a different time zone.
#4. Doesn’t Disrupt Workflow (Answer When It’s Convenient for You)
When Geekbot prompts you to answer the standup questions at a specific time, you don’t have to do it right away (there are no time limits).
You can answer at any time that is convenient for you and doesn’t disrupt your workday (i.e. after you’re done with a specific task/project, and not right in the middle of it).
In comparison, with video call standups, you might be in the zone and coding for the last 2 hours. But if a meeting is set to start in 10 mins, then you have to drop everything you’re doing and break out of a flow to attend.
As we mentioned earlier, you could set how often Geekbot sends you reminders when you haven’t completed the answers.
For example, if a standup starts at 2:00 PM, then you can set the first reminder to go out after half an hour, and the second reminder to go out after 2 hours:
However, by default, Geekbot reminders are turned off — you have to activate this option in your settings.
One of our customers wrote a relevant Geekbot review on Capterra about the non-intrusive nature of our bot (see highlighted orange part).
#5. Transparency & Accountability (Aligns Your Team and Keeps Everyone in the Loop)
Geekbot posts the standup answers in a public Slack channel that the entire team can see. The obvious benefit is that it keeps folks accountable/on the same page.
But there’s more to it:
You can stay up to date on what other teams in your company are working on (not just your own team). It eliminates the need for Scrum of Scrums.
Below are a few relevant, highlighted quotes (in orange) about transparency & accountability from some of Geekbot’s 51 Capterra reviews:
#6. Archives (Written Record & Searchable History)
This is a unique benefit to standups being conducted in Slack. You can go back in time and see a written (and searchable) history of your team’s standup answers.
There are a few benefits to having a searchable archive:
- Comes in handy if you forget what someone is working on. Managers can easily review past answers to see how the week or month has gone or why a particular project may have taken longer than expected.
- Scrum teams can analyze projects to see what went wrong (i.e. lack of communication) and avoid similar mistakes in the future.
- Some Geekbot customers use the written record to run better retrospectives.
- Product managers can also use archives to evaluate an employee’s performance & progress over time.
You can find past answers via:
- Slack channel where the answers are normally posted.
- Geekbot’s dashboard (filter by specific dates and times).
- CSV file (downloadable in Geekbot’s dashboard).
- Webhooks or Geekbot’s API(send answer data to products like Asana, Trello, Jira, and so on).
- Geekbot can integrate seamlessly to all the regular tools your team uses on a daily basis. You’re not limited, and you can design the perfect workflow that works for you using Webhooks/API.
- You can also choose to receive standup summaries via email:
And choose the frequency of email summaries:
#7. Teams Could Use Slack-Based Standup Meetings Alongside Video Meetings (Meeting Prep)
We’ve seen several teams use our Geekbot + Slack as a video call prep/outline to shorten meetings. You can set up Geekbot to send the meeting prep questions in Slack 30 minutes before the call (questions are completely customizable).
People’s answers get posted in Slack. Then, the team can refer to the written updates and quickly address them in a Zoom or Google Hangouts meeting.
Teammates don’t have to speak for a long time and explain their updates if everything is alreadywritten beforehand. They can focus the video meeting on the most important discussion points, not just a long stream of updates.
How to Improve Team Bonding with Slack-Based Remote Meetings
One could make the argument that daily scrums in Slack aren’t as personal as video calls & don’t promote team bonding.
But if you’re an agile team that runs standups everyday, those long Zoom or Hangout meetings add up over time and take time away from tasks. So there’s a tradeoff between greater team bonding with video calls VS saving time with Geekbot.
That being said, you can still use Geekbot to achieve the team bonding function of standups in a few ways:
1. You can go into Geekbot’s settings and alter the 3 default standup questions. Some of our customers add a “How do you feel?” question at the start of each standup:
This check-in question gives insight into team morale & happiness. For example, is anyone feeling overloaded or stressed out today? Any personal issues that could affect someone’s work?
Geekbot can even analyze natural language responses for standup questions like “How do you feel?” and produce a team happiness graph:
In talking with customers, we also found that some of them use the following question in Monday standups:
“What did you do this weekend?”
2. We also have a preset/feature called “Pizza Toppings”, where our Slack standup bot sends out random, fun team bonding questions like:
- What is your favorite movie?
- What shows are you watching right now?
- What is your favorite type of Sandwich?
- Etc.
Answers then get posted in a public Slack channel and everyone can chime in with a comment if they’d like. Teammates get to know each other on a more personal level.
This is one of Geekbot’s most popular presets and some customers use it as a daily & habitual teambonding activity.
Geekbot lets teams replace tedious/long video call standups with efficient, transparent standup meetings in Slack. Join our 60,000 users and thousands of companies who use us like GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, Asana, and more. Sign up for a free 30 day trial of Geekbot here.
Frequently asked questions
What do you say in a daily standup?
As a participant in a daily standup meeting you need to share with your team three important things: 1. What did you do since the last standup meeting? 2. What are you going to do next? 3. Are there any challenges that currently prevent you from working on your objectives? It’s important for every standup participant to keep their answers short and focused.
How do you run an effective daily stand up meeting?
To run an effective stand up meeting you need to follow two important rules. First, your meetings need to be short. A typical stand up meeting lasts no longer than 15 and it’s critical to not drag the meeting for longer. Second, an effective standup meeting is only about sharing progress and challenges. If team members want more detailed discussion around certain issues, they need to schedule a follow up meeting.
What are the 3 questions asked at a Scrum standup meeting?
Although a particular phrasing may vary from team to team, here are the three questions that every team member needs to answer during a Scrum Standup meeting: 1. What have you completed since the last meeting? 2. What do you plan to finish by the next meeting? What is in your way?
Frequently asked questions
What do you say in a daily standup?
As a participant in a daily standup meeting you need to share with your team three important things: 1. What did you do since the last standup meeting? 2. What are you going to do next? 3. Are there any challenges that currently prevent you from working on your objectives? It’s important for every standup participant to keep their answers short and focused.
How do you run an effective daily stand up meeting?
To run an effective stand up meeting you need to follow two important rules. First, your meetings need to be short. A typical stand up meeting lasts no longer than 15 and it’s critical to not drag the meeting for longer. Second, an effective standup meeting is only about sharing progress and challenges. If team members want more detailed discussion around certain issues, they need to schedule a follow up meeting.
What are the 3 questions asked at a Scrum standup meeting?
Although a particular phrasing may vary from team to team, here are the three questions that every team member needs to answer during a Scrum Standup meeting: 1. What have you completed since the last meeting? 2. What do you plan to finish by the next meeting? What is in your way?
The massive popularity of Slack has turned daily Slack standups into a must for teams who use the tool as their primary communication platform.
It sounds easy enough, everyone gets on and updates Slack once a day to let the team know what they are working on. But, if you’ve done this for a while, a few tips and tactics help, here they are:
1. Stick To 3 Simple Standup Questions
We use and recommend the same questions to all of our Jell customers. These daily scrum questions, originally from long-standing scrum practices, get to the point, and over time you won’t even have to restate them, everyone will just know 1… 2… 3…
- What did you accomplish yesterday?
- What do you plan to accomplish today?
- What challenges stand in your way?
2. Choose A Morning Deadline For Submissions
This works well if everyone works the same hours. It’s best for the team manager to establish a deadline so they can spend time each morning looking at the answers.
This encourages employees to get it done each day, instead of continually putting it off. 10AM is a great time for the timeline because it is in the morning and there is plenty of time to work after that.
3. Add Reminders For Submissions
One way to make sure everyone gets their submission in before deadline is to add a reminder to the standup channel. Give the team a reminder about an hour before all submissions are due.
4. Encourage Mentioning Others In Challenges
Encourage team members to mention someone they are waiting on in their standup. Remind people this isn’t calling someone out, it’s simply letting the team and leader know they are working with someone on a project and it isn’t finished yet.
5. Take advantage of Slack’s Slash commands
With Jell, you can manage your standups directly from Slack with these helpful slash commands. Simply type /jell help from Slack for more info.
Daily Slack Standup Suggestions for Team Leaders
Read all of the daily slack standup messages, and follow up on any challenges immediately.
Contribute your own daily standup for the team. This shows transparency and openness with the team.
**Important Tip for Managers** Leaders need to acknowledge good work, even if it’s just w/ a quick emoji reaction — that helps team members know you’re paying attention, you appreciate accomplishments, and want people to continue to share their wins.
Save Daily Slack Standups For Later Consideration
When you run through Slack for free you’ll lose track of what people have said in the past and any progress team members have made (once your slack channel has hit the 10k messages which go a lot faster than you think it will).
Consider Connecting Goals, Objectives & Key Results to Daily Standups
Companies like Google are big on connecting daily work (and standups) with quarterly and long-term goals to encourage smart work. This is a productive goal for the rest of us to live up to.
You can read more about OKRs in this ebook we put together. You’ll especially enjoy it if you are striving to get more important work done on your team.
We are biased, of course, but we love using Jell for daily slack standups and OKRs, since our Jellbot works in Slack team members can submit their standups right in Slack, and the Jell dashboard will help team leaders make sure everyone is focusing on the right objectives and key results.
Here’s a peek at what it looks like:
Daily Slack Standups – Convince The Team To Participate
One of the most common problems with daily Slack standups is getting the entire team to participate. There always seems to be that one person who doesn’t like this seemingly ‘Big Brother’ approach.
It’s a shame team members see it this way because it all comes down to perspective. They are looking at it as being micromanaged, but that’s not at all what standups are about.
You have to make sure you share your vision with them about how their life will be easier with less blockers and more collaboration.
Slack Daily Reminder Software
Looking to prepare your team to adopt a new technology?
Check out this helpful post, 6 Ways to Jell: Your Guide to Better Technology Adoption
Conclusion
It’s sometimes difficult to get the whole team on board for a new tool or process, but it can be done, and in this case, it makes a big impact on the effectiveness of your team. Try it out, and use some of our tips, we have a lot of experience and want to help.
Additionally, if you have any suggestions for others around daily standups, we are all ears. Leave a comment below, and we’ll edit this article to include it.
Slack Daily Reminder
A focused team gets impressive results. Help your team focus with daily Slack standups, objectives, and key results.
Slack Reminder Examples
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