Daily standups.
For many agile teams, they're as routine as grabbing that first cup of coffee. But lately, there's been growing discussion among Scrum Masters, engineering managers, and project leads: Are these daily meetings truly adding value, or have they become just another mandatory check-in?
It's understandable why teams are starting to question the effectiveness of standups. Meetings have multiplied, especially for remote or distributed teams leading to genuine concerns that standups might be draining productivity rather than enhancing it.
If you're responsible for facilitating these meetings, you've probably faced this too. Should your team keep holding daily standups exactly as you always have? Could you make small adjustments to regain their value? Or is it perhaps time to move away from daily standups altogether?
In this article, we'll discuss how to assess your current standup, identify signs that it might be time for a change, and offer realistic alternatives to help your team stay aligned, motivated, and productive.
5 Signs It's Time to Change Your Daily Standup
As teams evolve, the practices that once served them well sometimes start feeling out of touch. Daily standups are no exception. Here are some clear indicators it might be time to rethink how your team is doing standups:
1. Meetings Feel Like Status Updates: Standups should be quick checkpoints, not lengthy status reports. If your standups have become repetitive, with team members simply listing out their tasks, the original purpose is likely getting lost. Ideally, daily meetings foster team alignment, tackle blockers, and provide clarity—not bore your team with unnecessary details.
2. Your Team Views Standups as Unproductive: If team members regularly multitask, seem disengaged, or even express frustration about daily standups, that's a clear warning sign. Standups are meant to energize and inform, not drain energy and morale. Persistent complaints usually signal it’s time to reconsider your meeting format or frequency.
3. Effective Communication Is Already Happening Elsewhere: Many modern teams naturally gravitate toward asynchronous collaboration—tools like Jira, Rally, Slack, or GitHub discussions make constant communication easy. If your team is already proactively addressing blockers, sharing progress, and staying aligned throughout the day, your daily standup might be redundant.
4. Remote Teams Struggle with Scheduling: Distributed or remote teams often face additional challenges, especially around scheduling standups across different time zones. If team members find themselves regularly joining at inconvenient hours, or if meetings have turned transactional rather than collaborative, it might be time to explore more flexible solutions.
5. Standups Frequently Go Off-Topic: Standups should be short and to-the-point, yet many teams find their meetings drifting into unrelated discussions. When the standup consistently becomes sidetracked or overly detailed, it not only wastes valuable time—it also frustrates team members.
If these points resonate with your experience, you're probably overdue for a fresh look at your daily standup routine. Next, we'll discuss clear criteria to help you decide whether to keep, modify, or drop your standups entirely.
Benefits of Keeping Your Daily Standups
With all this talk about changing or dropping standups, it’s easy to overlook why this ceremony became popular in the first place. The daily standup has remained a staple of agile teams for years and for good reasons. Before deciding to scrap or drastically modify your standup, it’s important to revisit some its benefits:
1. Daily Standups Keep Your Team Aligned: At their best, daily standups give your team a snapshot of ongoing work. Everyone quickly understands who’s working on what, and any misunderstandings or misalignments get cleared up before they grow into bigger issues.
2. Standups Help Identify Blockers Early: A daily standup helps teams quickly recognize and address obstacles. By openly discussing challenges, you are able to solve issues immediately or at least flag them early enough to minimize disruptions.
3. Regular Standups Build Team Cohesion: Especially for remote or distributed teams, daily standups can help maintain a sense of unity. Seeing your teammates briefly each day, even virtually can build trust, empathy, and shared understanding, strengthening your team culture.
4. Short Meetings Encourage Accountability: Short, daily interactions naturally reinforce accountability. Knowing that they'll share their progress daily, team members are often motivated to keep momentum and complete tasks on time, creating a subtle but powerful driver of productivity.
5. Keeping Meetings Short and Purposeful: When done right, standups are short, focused, and intentional, helping teams avoid unnecessary lengthy meetings throughout the day. The structure encourages concise updates and sharpens team communication habits overall.
The key to retaining these benefits, however, is ensuring your standups actually deliver on their promise. If they no longer align with your team's needs, it's time to adapt rather than discard them outright. Next, we'll provide some criteria to help you make that decision thoughtfully.
How to Decide Whether to Keep or Change Your Daily Standups
So far, we’ve explored the signs that your daily standups might need a refresh, as well as reasons they’re valuable. Now let’s look at clear, practical criteria that can help you make an informed decision about whether to keep, adjust, or even drop your daily meetings:
1. Assess the Real Value Your Standups Provide: Take a moment to honestly evaluate the benefits your team receives from standups. Are critical blockers identified and resolved? Does everyone leave with clarity about their work and goals? Or has the standup become a repetitive routine that doesn't add value to the team's workflow?
If your meetings aren’t meaningfully moving your team forward, it's probably time for a change.
2. Gauge Your Team’s Engagement Level: Check in with your team regularly about how they feel during and after standups. Are team members active, attentive, and motivated during meetings—or are they disengaged, multitasking, or visibly frustrated?
Low engagement signals issues with how your meetings are structured. You might consider adjusting the frequency, timing, or length to re-engage your team.
3. Evaluate Existing Communication Channels: If your team already naturally collaborates and resolves issues through asynchronous methods—like Jira, Rally, or Slack—daily synchronous meetings might be redundant. Conversely, if issues frequently slip through the cracks, daily standups could still play a vital role.
Be honest about how effectively your team currently communicates outside standups—this insight can guide your decision.
4. Consider Your Team's Working Style and Preferences: Not all teams thrive with the same approach. Remote or distributed teams, for instance, often benefit from asynchronous or flexible communication. On the other hand, highly collaborative or co-located teams might still thrive with quick daily check-ins.
Ask your team directly about their preferred communication style and frequency, and factor this heavily into your decision.
5. Run an Experiment and Get Feedback" Ultimately, the best way to see if standups need changing is to try something new. Consider experimenting with alternatives—like async standups or weekly sessions—then ask your team for honest feedback.
A short, structured experiment can quickly reveal whether your current format is effective or if another approach might work better.
In the next section, we’ll explore practical alternatives to traditional standups that your team can start experimenting with right away.
Alternatives to Daily Standups
If you've decided traditional daily standups aren't working well for your team, there are alternatives worth trying. We've previously written about three effective approaches: Async Standups, Weekly Sync + Ongoing Chats, and an Office Hours model in our article 3 Alternatives to Scrum Standup Meetings.
In summary:
- Async Standups: Team members share written updates at their own convenience. This approach is helpful if your team works across multiple time zones or has different working schedules.
- Weekly Sync with Ongoing Chat Discussions: Your team reduces daily meetings to one strategic weekly session, complemented by continuous communication in chat channels like Rally. This method gives your team more space to work deeply while ensuring issues are addressed promptly. This is the approach we use at Rally.
- Office Hours: You set specific times each week when team members can voluntarily join to address blockers or collaborate on immediate problems. This flexible, as-needed format helps minimize unnecessary meetings and keeps interactions focused and what's meaningful.
How to Successfully Experiment with New Standup Formats (and Get Your Team’s Buy-In)
Deciding to change your standup routine is one thing—successfully implementing that change is another. To smoothly transition to new standup practices, it's important to thoughtfully experiment and ensure your team feels involved. Here’s how you can do it effectively:
1. Clearly Communicate the Purpose of the Experiment: Be transparent about why you're exploring changes. Explain the problems you're hoping to solve—such as meeting fatigue, lack of engagement, or ineffective communication—and how the new format might address them. Your team will be more supportive if they understand the rationale behind the shift.
2. Set a Clear Timeframe for the Trial: Avoid indefinite changes. Instead, propose a clear experimental period—say, two or three weeks—to test the new approach. Your team will find it easier to commit if they know there's a chance to review, reflect, and revise again afterward.
3. Ask for Regular, Honest Feedback: Throughout the experiment, actively encourage your team to share their thoughts. Create simple ways for them to provide feedback, such as quick surveys, one-on-one check-ins, or brief retrospective meetings. Open dialogue helps you quickly identify what's working and what needs adjusting.
4. Make Adjustments Based on Feedback: Be prepared to adjust your approach based on what the team shares. The whole point of experimenting is to learn and improve—so stay flexible and responsive to ensure you end up with a practice everyone values.
5. Celebrate Wins and Learn from Challenges: As you test different methods, highlight successes and openly acknowledge when things don’t go perfectly. Celebrating small wins encourages buy-in, while transparently addressing challenges builds trust and team cohesion.
Remember, the goal isn't perfection—it's continuous improvement. By clearly communicating your goals, openly involving your team, and embracing flexibility, you can successfully evolve your standup practices and create lasting improvements.
Conclusion
When it comes to daily standups, the best solution isn’t always all-or-nothing. Many teams, including ours at Rally have discovered that a hybrid approach combining synchronous and asynchronous communication offers the best result.
For example, your team might use asynchronous daily updates to reduce daily meeting time, combined with a weekly live meeting. Or perhaps your team opts for occasional real-time office hours combined with continuous asynchronous chat in platforms like Rally. The beauty of a hybrid approach is flexibility: it empowers your team to blend different methods until you find what truly works best.
At Rally, after testing several standup variations, we’ve settled into a comfortable hybrid format. We rely primarily on async updates through Rally’s chat, paired with weekly live sessions to address broader topics or complex blockers. This combination gives us continuous alignment and keeps everyone focused without sacrificing cohesion.
The takeaway here is straightforward: don't feel locked into one format. Hybrid approaches let your team maintain the advantages of regular check-ins while reducing interruptions and improving overall team productivity.
