Anti-Patterns of Distributed Team Stand-Ups
Running distributed teams is a reality to access global talent. But we generally continue to use systems or habits built for co-location.
This article is a short list of anti-patterns that I’ve noticed while being an engineer and engineering manager for distributed teams at Salesforce and several start-ups. For other distributed team’s that are keen on ideas for continuous improvement I hope this is a helpful list of patterns to spot and avoid.
#1 — Nothing to report
Many smart people take a lot of responsibility for their work but then use the phrase “nothing to report” in a stand-up. People generally are more independent with their work when distributed and sometimes it appears more efficient to opt out of updating your team.
It’s hard to stop this because work is getting done and there is great focus. But if you’re trying to work as a team this is leaving the rest of the team out of the loop with important daily changes. The team will not be able to adapt and may feel disengaged from the changes.
Without updates a team is certainly not going to be able to adapt to change — the opposite of agility. Share what you’ve done, encourage others to share, and really listen. It’s the most basic habit of being part of a team.
#2 — Distractions
You’re on a hangout stand-up trying to listen but the speakers mic is cutting out. You just received a notification that has captured your attention. You’re trying to remember what exactly you got done yesterday. Meanwhile you’ve missed several important updates. We often miss a lot of what our team is trying to share with us because of distractions.
In person a nudge or a glance can get someones attention and the point across. When distributed, its difficult to notice if someone has become distracted (unless you hear them typing which makes it pretty clear). Having everyone’s camera on is the best option. The camera introduces the social pressure of others seeing what you’re doing and if you’re paying attention while giving your teammates piece of mind that you’re listening.
Many distributed teams are switching to asynchronous stand-ups. Asynchronous stand-ups give everyone time to focus on a concise update for their team. Updates are gathered and can be consumed by the team individually when the person can focus on digesting the updates. This method separate the update from any discussion and this actually speeds ups the process. Discussion happens organically afterwords through a preferred channel.
#3 — Meeting as Rituals
A team accrues “team alignment debt” during periods where a team is not communicating but changes are being made. Debt is a bad thing and eventually needs to be paid. The common solution to pay team debt is with meetings. With stand-up meetings, team members catch-up with each other on their progress in a sprint and make appropriate adjustments. Then, after the stand-up, more changes happen that accrue as team alignment debt to be resolved in the next stand-up.
What happens when someone can’t make the stand-up? More debt accrues both from her updates not being received and her not receiving the rest of the team.
The problem is even more pronounced or impossible to solve when a team is distributed between offices in different timezones.
Meetings as rituals are a hack to fix accrued debt and they completely break down under non-ideal circumstances or with distributed teams. Find another way to keep aligned more frequently with text (Slack) or video (Catch).
#4 — In-person tools
Using a physical board and stickies and gathering the team in a circle is pleasantly simple. If you have a co-located team it’s fun and efficient to to do this. But as soon as you have one remote member it breaks down.
Using Hangouts and Trello boards simulates the in-person experience and is a good first step but we need to do more. With these tools sometimes the mic is too quiet, sometimes people have side discussions in-person that don’t transmit, often referencing the board is ambiguous. The remote person is not involved in this ritual nearly as much as people in-person. These tools fair better when everyone on the team is remote.
Looking to open source projects, which have successfully operated as distributed teams for quite some time, we don’t see any stand-ups or scrum boards. We see pull request and chat as things happen. Teams on open source projects have adapted to being a distributed system in a more advanced way.
#5 — Too much text
Text is quiet and fast and so pervasive that it feels like a natural way to communicate. In a distributed setting it’s our crutch to maintain our ability to talk with our team. We use gifs and emojis to be more expressive but ultimately text does not foster strong team relationships like in-person communication does and may even degrade them over time. But text is the cheapest way to transmit communication over time and space.
That said, times are changing. Video is continuously getting cheaper to transmit and store and many more inexpensive video tools for teams are coming to market.
Before you go…
Have you tried asynchronous video stand-ups with your team? You should. We’ve been busy building Catch to do just that. Give it a try. It’s free to use!
