Daily standups in remote teams

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

Here are some comments from remote teams about their daily standup habits:

GitLab

"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."

Stanwood

"Project office hours" twice a day at 10am and 4pm. Daily Check ins in our slack standup channel."

Latchel

"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."

Niteo

"Our daily standups are at 10 AM CE(S)T. They usually take less than 15 minutes."

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.