Whether people are working in the office or remote, it’s important to get all your team members together regularly to keep the momentum going. A daily meeting with your employees maintains team spirit and reminds everyone that social interactions are important.
Good communication helps people stay motivated and engaged. It’s one of the key factors for effective team collaboration.
What happens at a daily meeting?
A daily meeting, sometimes called a daily scrum meeting, is a short team meeting completed as the first task at the beginning of each day. The idea is to let your employees know about progress on current projects and stay up-to-date on each person’s objectives.
The format is simple and has three sections:
- Announce what was completed the day before
- Communicate what has to be done today
- Talk about any challenges or roadblocks encountered
These three items replace an agenda which saves time.
The objective is to make sure the team will reach its goals and if not, to understand why the task is more complicated than expected.
If we’re having trouble with our work, we can let team members know directly in order to get their help and remove roadblocks.
Note that the goal isn’t to account for exactly how you spent your time on certain tasks but to update the team on your progress in a concise way. To make these meetings effective, they should be 15 minutes or less!
What are the advantages?
A daily meeting has several benefits for participants. With a recurring meeting, people get in a habit that builds their motivation and starts the day with a reminder of their objectives and tasks. This motivation helps each employee fulfil their commitments.
In addition, this type of meeting is useful for identifying what has been done and what is left to do. You can get a better handle on project progress and make sure you’re meeting sprint objectives.
Each employee will be more efficient because these work meetings require team members to stay organised in their daily tasks. This also makes it easier to understand each team member’s capacity and speed.
The goals of this meeting also include maintaining team spirit even when working remotely and being more responsive to issues that may involve all employees.
How to make it effective
If you’re still debating whether to set up a daily meeting with your team, here are five tips for starting off on the right foot.
Keep it short
As we mentioned before, a daily meeting should last 15 minutes max. Any longer and the objectives won’t be fulfilled because participants’ attention will wander and the meeting won’t be effective. This daily meeting isn’t about discussing general project management or diving too far into the details. It’s only for talking about the main tasks.
Use a collaborative tool to visualise each person’s tasks better
Collaborative tools are a great way to organise these meetings and make them more efficient. For example, with Beekast, each employee can add their daily tasks to a virtual board with a ready-to-use activity template. No need to reserve a meeting room. Just use visual management to maximise the efficiency of your daily meetings.
Prep your action lists in advance
By getting organised ahead of time and identifying upfront all the tasks that have to be completed in a day, we are more effective in our work. If we start the day organised, we tend to keep better track of our daily actions.
Make daily meetings dynamic to hold everyone’s attention
When you’re leading a meeting and want to hold everyone’s attention, you need to make things interactive. Here’s how: share your screen, make sure everyone has a chance to talk, expand on ideas and speak up often so people don’t lose track of the discussion.
Use active listening
Active listening enables each person to better understand other people’s work. When we see that others are interested in our work, it makes our tasks more meaningful, which motivates us to continue working.
Another format you can try for your daily meetings is the daily stand up meeting! It’s exactly the same as we described earlier, except that everyone stays standing to maximise efficiency.
While you’re deciding on the right format, check out our session templates which will help you organise your daily meetings. Just create a free account!