A Quick and Easy Slack Hack to Augment My Team’s Daily Standup
Why performance anxiety renders so many daily standups useless and how you can use technology to fix it.
In previous articles, we’ve built out some really cool automation in Slack. We’ve talked about how you can use Slack to automate your own career documentation and professional development for your team. These use cases aren’t particularly revolutionary… They only involve a couple of workflows and integrations with other tools and are just scratching the surface of what Slack is capable of doing.
But today, instead of diving deeper into more complex integrations, I want to take a step back and focus on a simple use case that could help a ton of teams that can be implemented in just a couple of minutes.
If your team runs daily standups as part of an Agile process, this simple Slack Hack could supercharge the efficacy of your team’s daily touch-base.
Let’s dive into why daily standups are inefficient (even if they’re useful!), how we can automate the pieces of our standup that lead to inefficiency, and what the future of these meetings could look like once we augment them with software.
The Great Inefficiency of Daily Standups
I actually love daily standups. I think they’re an incredibly useful way to get everyone aligned and working towards the same goal. I also have noticed a consistent inefficiency in the implementation of the typical daily standup.
Tell me if this sounds familiar…
Everyone shows up to the standup prepared to talk about what they’re working on
We go around the horn and everyone speaks, but no one listens… Why? Because people are too busy worrying about what they’re going to say!
When we reach the end of the meeting, there was little or no discussion or engagement. The only person who was listening the whole time was the person moderating the discussion.
We’ve got a team full of people who are worried about their own answers. They want to show progress. They want to look busy. They want their boss to think the work they’re doing matters. They’re performing for us, and we expect them to take time out of that performance to listen to everyone else.
This is the death spiral of the daily standup. When our standups turn into “stand and report” meetings instead of collaboration meetings, they lose their efficacy.
But what if we could reduce all of those anxieties and free our team up to actually listen instead of worrying about what they’re going to say?
Enter automation.
Setting Up Your Daily Standup Slack Automation
We want to take the bulk of the communication that happens during our existing standups and turn it into an asynchronous Slack message. This will allow us to do a few things:
We can use a portion of this meeting for team building: By replacing the bulk of our standup with async communication, we buy ourselves time back for team building. We can spend the first 5 minutes of a 15-minute standup on small talk and “water cooler convos” because we don’t have as much content to get through.
Our team can focus on listening and collaborating: No more performance anxiety on Zoom. Get the team out of their heads and focused on listening and helping their teammates. The less our teammates are responsible for “delivering a report” during this meeting, the more they’ll be able to focus on the team versus the individual.
We can show up prepared to discuss blockers: The utility of a daily standup is in its ability to quickly resolve blockers and challenges for teammates. By sharing our updates asynchronously ahead of time, our team can review others’ standup notes beforehand and show up prepared with suggestions, recommendations, and research. We’ll never get caught flat-footed in a standup again. We can show up knowing what we’re there to work through.
This use case is so simple, Slack has already set up a template for it in its workflow builder. You can use the simple prompt they’ve built or you could leverage Slack forms like we’ve done in the past to be more prescriptive and standardized with your prompts.
Cutting Off the Ends of the Ham in a Remote-First World
As our society fully embraces a remote-first world, we’re at an interesting inflection point. To illustrate where we are today, I want to borrow from one of my favorite allegories… The story of the Great Grandma and the ham.
A young girl was watching her mother bake a ham for a family gathering and noticed her mom cutting off the ends before placing it in the oven.
“Mom, why do you cut the ends off before baking the ham?” she asked.
“Hmmm… I think it helps soak up the juices while it’s baking. I’m not sure, though. That’s just the way your grandma always did it, so I’ve just always cut them off. Why don’t you call grandma and ask her?”
So, the little girl phoned her grandma and asked “Grandma, mom is making a ham and cut off the ends before placing it in the oven. She said that it’s probably to help soak up the juices but wasn’t sure. She said you’d know because she learned how to cook from you.”
“That’s true. I do cut off the ends of the ham before baking. But I’m not sure why either. I learned how to cook from my mom. You should ask her.”
So, the inquisitive little girl called her great grandmother and asked “Great grandma, mom and grandma said they learned how to cook a ham from watching you. Do you cut off the ends of the ham to help it soak up the juices?”
The great grandmother chuckled. “Oh, no sweetie. I just never had a pan big enough to hold a whole ham, so I always had to cut off the ends to make it fit.”
This simple automation is just the beginning of a far more transformational shift.
Rituals like the daily standup are artifacts of a previous world… They’re remnants from a world where we didn’t have a pan big enough to fit the whole ham. As we’ve moved fully remote, many organizations continue to cut off the ends of the ham out of pure status quo bias.
Those organizations will survive today but will struggle to thrive tomorrow. The companies that thrive in this new economy will be those that are willing to re-think how they work and adapt to their new context.
This is why I’m so excited about the future of work. With the technology that exists today, we can completely transform our digital workspaces. We can use Slack and Zapier to automate major swaths of management activity to make our teams more effective. We can use ChatGPT to answer employee questions and remove administrative burdens from HR and IT.
We can cook more ham than ever before, but we have to have the courage to say goodbye to our great-grandma’s secret recipe.
Tim Hickle is a marketing leader who helps high-growth startups and scale-ups get unstuck and hit their goals while embracing AI and the future of work. To learn more about how Tim can help your organization grow, visit TimHickle.com