Running a Remote Work Stand-up — Rule #2: Upgrade YTB to DCI

In the first post in this series, I talk about how remote team stand-ups are fundamentally different than their face-to-face equivalents. I follow these five rules to help me run a great remote stand-up for my team:

1. Now It’s Personal
2. Forget “Yesterday, Today, Blockers” and embrace “Decisions, Choices, Impediments”
3. Call Multiple Plays
4. Wrap-it-up like a pro
5. Prepare a Cheat Sheet

Today’s post is about Rule #2: Forget “Yesterday, Today, Blockers” and embrace “Decisions, Choices, Impediments.”

Many face-to-face stand-ups follow a simple script to ensure that everyone on the team shares their status quickly and efficiently by answering three questions:

This structure makes a ton of sense for these physical meetings because the primary goal is a shared understanding of “WHAT” everyone is working on. I’ve proposed an alternative structure for remote meetings that help uncover the “WHY” and “SO WHAT” baked into everyone’s workload. They are the three questions I’d recommend for a daily remote stand-up:

What critical DECISIONS did I make yesterday?

I believe best practice for a remote-team is to leverage a shared tool for tracking work accomplished, and work-in-progress. Regardless of the specific tool (you could be using Trello, Jira, or Evernote) everyone on the team should have constant visibility into what you’re getting done on a daily basis. Recapping this verbally for the team, “Yesterday, I wrote the first draft of the new article on Financial Advisors,” adds little or no new information.

Instead, give folks insight into the most important decisions you made with an eye towards how it might impact everyone else on the team. Think something like “I wrapped up my draft of that article on Financial Advisors. I decided to use a house of cards metaphor in my concluding paragraph so Sally might want to start looking for A-spot imagery to match. It’s also twice as long as we agreed and I’m wondering if that’s okay. Let’s get editorial involved early.”

Without this additional information both the art team and the editorial team might not realize that they’ve got additional work until it’s too late. The larger or more complex the team the more important this context sharing is critical.

When you’ve got knowledge workers on a remote team calling special attention to critical decisions highlights the need for collaboration earlier and leads to better outcomes.

What CHOICES are ahead of me today?

Again, since everyone should already know what you’re working on today you’re looking to share more information than just WHAT. Help your team understand the toughest decisions you’ll have to make in your work for the day so that they can better support you. Instead of “Today, I’m designing the user log-in page” share something like “Today, I’m designing the user log-in page. I need to determine if two-factor authentication makes sense, and create a reusable design pattern for text input fields.”

If your team-mates are actually listening (this is the point of these meetings right?) then they can immediately provide context or helping information to save you time and energy. John from development might share “Two-factor authentication is going to break our engineering budget, so unless you believe it’s a hard requirement then let’s leave it till phase 2.” Sally another designer could share “We just designed a killer log-in page on my other project and it’s already ADA compliant! Send me a note on slack and I’ll send you the design files. Maybe it saves you some time.”

Do I have any IMPEDIMENTS?

Your team’s ability to provide immediate feedback or supporting information helps ensure that your solo-working time is as efficient as possible. Your uncertainty about two-factor authentication is completely missing from a simple update like “Today I’m designing log-in” but sharing that you’re making a critical decision provides your team-mates visibility needed to do their jobs better. Focus on upcoming choices, not upcoming actions.

If you’ve been in these types of meetings for a while you’d be shocked how often you hear each person’s update finish with “no blockers.” I believe that “blocked or not” is way too binary of a question, and doesn’t help a leader identify ways to make their team most effective. I believe that we’re all pretty good about sharing when we’re 100% blocked on a particular task, but we don’t do a great job calling out when we’re being less than effective because of inter-team dependencies.

I ask teams to share anything that’s causing them to be less than optimally effective. A developer working on a data ingest function might claim they have “no blockers” but a closer investigation might reveal that they still don’t have access to the data services they ingesting data from. Instead of no-blockers I’d rather they share “I’m working on data ingest, and I still don’t have access to the data service we’re pulling from. I can keep moving forward against the sample data but if there’s any difference between that and the live data I’ll have some re-work.”

This additional context allows managers to ask follow-up questions to understand the impact of the slow-down and prioritize getting it resolved. I can decide to make a call to get this developer the access he needs, I can ask about maybe switching to a different task with fewer unknowns, or I can decide to accept the risk for the time being. The important thing here is that the team works together to remain not only “unblocked” but also as efficient as possible throughout the duration of the work.

As an added bonus, no one enjoys being less productive or efficient than they otherwise could be. Keeping your team moving quickly is a great boost to morale and job satisfaction.

In summary, I believe that the old-standby of Yesterday, Today, Blockers should evolve to Decisions, Choices, Impediments for any remote project. This structure adds more fidelity to the information shared daily and empowers your team to collaboratively solve problems before they become a crisis. Use your precious live collaboration time to get everyone on the same page!

Check back here soon to learn about my 3rd Rule: Call Multiple Plays.

Scatterbrain is a boutique consultancy helping companies unlock the full potential of remote teams. We’re rethinking how remote teams operate to maximize employee happiness, team effectiveness, and business impact. Learn how we can help in your journey at WeAreScatterbrain.com

Originally published at https://wearescatterbrain.com on July 25, 2019.