The Stand-up meeting’s been around for a while. The idea of having a meeting standing up, is to make people less comfortable to talk at length. This, in turn, should lead to short and to the point meetings. The common structure of the stand-up meeting is going around and letting each team member briefly update on what they did yesterday, are about to do today and most importantly — where they are stuck.
The Problem with Stand-Up Meetings
I’ve been a long time participant in such meetings; these have some good things and some bad things going for them. Here they are:
Stand-up is good for | Stand-up is bad for |
| Giving everyone a chance to talk. | Seeing the BIG PICTURE. You can’t get the big picture from discussing low-level daily tasks. |
| Getting everyone together on a daily basis. | |
| Creating a feeling of togetherness. | |
| Syncing everyone to what everyone else is doing. |
What is the Big Picture?
The Big Picture is comprised of the high-level goals you wish to achieve. For example: When creating a product, high-level goals are the features that are important improvements on the product. Alternately, high-level goals can also be a conference you plan to present at or some big business development you’re working on.
Sharing the BIG PICTURE with your team is the best way you’ll get them to help. If you limit their knowledge to what you think they should do, rather than sharing it with them – you’re essentially limiting your company’s intelligence. Not sharing the BIG PICTURE means you decide who needs to know what and what they should do – you’re not harnessing everyone’s intelligence to help achieve the bigger goals.
Sharing the BIG PICTURE with your team empowers them, It lets them feel they know why they are working on what they were asked to and how their work matters.
The Big Picture and Stand-Up Meetings
At monday.com, we’ve changed the way we do stand-up meetings. We no longer talk about the low-level stuff everyone has to do. You can call it dog-fooding our product but it came as a necessity to share what we’re trying to achieve with the whole team.
Every day, we have a morning gathering, open the big screen and look at our high-level objectives. WE GO OVER GOAL AFTER GOAL, and not person by person. Each person who’s in charge of a high-level objective, talks about what has been done to promote it yesterday and what’s going to be done today – It’s also a perfect place to talk about if it’s stuck or not and unlike the regular standup where people don’t share that they are stuck (although you want them to), when you talk about objectives there is no problem admitting it’s stuck. This is what we gained by talking about high-level goals, rather than people’s daily tasks.
- It’s a true sync: people know what everyone else is working on and why.
- People are engaged throughout the meeting – it’s interesting.
- People help each other more, give ideas and support.
- Everyone knows what the company is trying to achieve and try to assist.
- People gain control over what they do – they don’t get carried away with side stuff – as they know the end goal.
- People gain a sense of mission: It’s much better to take part in the company’s goal than merely talk about your tasks.
Where to Start
You don’t have to use monday.com for your stand-up meetings, although we’d be happy if you will :). You just need to make a list of high-level management goals – for your product or your company – and make it accessible (transparent, in our jargon). Then, share it with your team.
You don’t have to do it all at once. You can choose not to start with a daily stand-up. You can begin with weekly high-level sync and see it evolve into a daily one. I assure you that sharing these goals and talking about them with everyone will spark people’s interest and make them feel more connected to what you are trying to achieve.
How monday.com Can Help
We’ve created monday.com to bridge the gap between High Level and Low Level. We believe that showing the BIG PICTURE empowers everyone on the team. It lets people see what’s missing and what’s redundant. When you have a fast-paced, fast deployment, quick to market attitude – you need everyone’s eye on the ball.
monday.com lets you share the BIG PICTURE, update it in real time and also dig deeper into the lower level and share things, collaborate and sync in real time.
This is our product – monday.com – making managing the high-level easy
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