3 Steps to Energize Stand-up Meetings While WFH
by Alvin Fong, Engineering Manager
Are your stand-up meetings a drag? Has it been the same three people speaking up for the past week, while half the team don’t even join the call? At TribalScale, we’re quickly reaching our fourth month of working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve been doing morning stand-ups all this time — and want to share some tips for keeping the material fresh and your employees engaged!
1. Set up a Rotation of Emcees
At TS, our morning stand-up ritual involves our team sharing:
- Latest news: from technology to business to anything out of the ordinary
- Kudos: shout-outs to people who have put in the extra mile
- Fail-fasts: being transparent with our slip-ups and learning from each other’s missteps
- Company Announcements: from new hires to what’s happening at our Lunch and Learns
When we shifted into WFH, we all joined our stand-up in the virtual world. Our first two weeks of WFH stand-ups were great. Everyone showed up armed with the latest tech and business news, and not all of the articles were COVID-related!
As the weeks went on we noticed a steady decrease in energy levels. We decided to switch things up by appointing a department for each weekday. HR and Marketing host on Mondays, Product on Tuesdays, etc. Within our Engineering/QA department, we drew up a rotation list, with a panel of three engineers hosting each stand-up.
Each daily stand-up meeting now has a different host, a different style!
2. Run an Icebreaker
We keep an eye on the time, keeping the icebreaker to around 5 minutes, before moving onto the rest of our stand-up content.
Desk Exercises
One of our engineers, whose kitchen island is now his workstation, demonstrated several exercises that could be done right from the barstool. We went over several wrist, neck, and leg stretches.
Straw Polls
With the loss of our in-person coffee breaks, it’s ever so slightly harder to learn about our fellow colleagues. Our team leveraged the Polly slack app to create a series of polls! It looks like a good portion of the tribe does our best work in the afternoons.
Group Quizzes
Pioneered by our friends in Design, the meeting host led us in an attempt to prove our collective 90's-kid-cred. We tackled the questions as a team, and our morning was energized!
Good morning in every language
One morning, we asked how many ways we can say “Good Morning!” Our team came up with 25 languages, can your team beat our score?
3 Encouraging Kudos and Fail-fasts
During these times, it’s far too common that employees have their heads down and are grinding out their workdays. It’s paramount that we recognize our people for their work, and give a shout-out to those who deliver above and beyond their duties.
Fail-fasts are equally important — holding ourselves accountable for our missteps, and teaching others what not to do. Displaying our fail-fasts demonstrates to the team that TribalScale is a safe place to take risks, make mistakes, and get it right.
It’s often difficult to get folks to speak up, especially when they feel the previous day was a “run-of-the-mill grind-it-out kind of day.” We encourage our daily hosts to prepare a couple of points from their past week.
Bonus: Take a Breather Slackbots (Workflows)
Outside of stand-up meetings, we programmed a simple Slack bot to send a notification to the team at certain times during the work week. The bot reminds us to take a short rest to recharge, refuel, and rehydrate.
Alvin Fong is an Engineering Manager at TribalScale. He develops apps on Android and Flutter platforms, and is changing his mindset every day to better accommodate TDD. His current interests include learning Kotlin testing and architecture patterns.
TribalScale is a global innovation firm that helps enterprises adapt and thrive in the digital era. We transform teams and processes, build best-in-class digital products, and create disruptive startups. Learn more about us on our website. Connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook!
