March 31, 2020: WFH & Standups
Good morning,
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On to the update.
WFH & Standups
What can technology startups learn from healthcare’s response to COVID-19? Turns out, quite a bit.
In my consulting work with startups, I find that leaders and team members both typically have a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of an agendaless meeting. We are taught that meetings without agendas are meetings where nothing gets done. And yet there is one type of meeting where it’s critical to open the floor to anything and everything.
From the Mayo Clinic:
They were not structured meetings. They did not have an agenda. It was a brief 15-minute sharing session where we talked about issues and assigned tasks out. With the collective wisdom of the group, many of the questions that were brought up could be answered right there on the call versus having emails with 40 people.
The Mayo Clinic is re-discovering the standup, a concept familiar to tech startups. And yet sadly most teams use standups as status updates, which is emphatically not what they are meant for.
As Mayo so elegantly puts it, during the standup the team “talk[s] about issues and assign[s] tasks”.
WFH teams sometimes create an “asynchronous status update” to take the place of the standup meeting, and while that practice is useful, it doesn’t replace the need for dedicated standup time.
Some teams need standup time every day (e.g. Mayo Clinic during COVID-19), others may only need it every week. These standups are sometimes called “tactical meetings” (as opposed to “strategic meetings”) and can last up to an hour while still being productive and useful.
If you’re able to do a standup synchronously over video chat, great. If you can’t, you’ll have to get creative. There are tools like Geekbot and Standuply that try and do this, although they fall into the trap of equating standups with status updates.
If your team does asynchronous standups, please chime in on the comments and let us know how you do it.
That’s all for today. If you’re interested in the remote cup of tea, sign up here.
See you tomorrow!
Andrew