Remote work

Daily remote team standups at GitLab, Stanwood, Latchel and Canny

Most teams are posting what they’re working on to the daily #standup channel thread in Slack. Some do video calls.

If you’re planning to join a remote team in a tech role, wouldn’t it be fun to imagine how your future life would look like?

You would wake up in your bed, and walk to your coffee machine, and walk to your laptop, and then...

Would you have a daily standup and what time? Would you write words to a Slack channel, or should you physically stand up on a Zoom call? (meaning, should you have your clothes on at this point?)

I asked remote companies about their daily standup habits and here are some of the comments:

"Don’t talk about what you did yesterday, this is not a reporting moment where everyone tries to look busy. Rather, kickstart the day with some bonding, solve anything blocking and share future plans so people can plan and act and ultimately save time."

"We have 2 different kind of daily stand ups:

1. "Project office hours" twice a day at 10am and 4pm: PM opens an appear.in room and everyone working on that project can quickly and easily join and discuss questions or roadblocks. The PM summarises the results and posts it to the project channel in slack.

2. Daily Check ins in our slack standup channel: Everyone posts once a day:
How many tickets are assigned to me? How many tickets did I close in this sprint so far? Can I take more tickets? Are there any roadblocks ahead of me?"

"We do Weekly Kickoff meetings and daily standups. In each daily standup we’ll also schedule out regular check-ins throughout the day with other team members that we’re working with. For example, you may schedule a check in with product in the middle of the day to make sure you understand all the requirements for a feature you’re working on."

"Post what you’re working on to the daily #standup channel thread in Slack."

Starting a day with a standup is a good way to share what’s happening in a team and encourage conversations about tasks in progress. It’s even more so in a distributed team, although this can be sometimes tricky with members spreading through a lot of different time zones.