Effective Communication: Daily Meetings and Follow ups – The Thinner Book
Since COVID-19 pandemic, lot of us started working remote. At our work we ended up having long daily meetings that sometimes could last for more than one hour. I wrote this piece to bring up the issue and put forward some guidelines that can help to communicate more effectively.
A daily meeting should function as a routine, a ritual if you may, to kick start the day. It’s the time where all the team members show up, say hi, and talk about 30 seconds in turn. So for us, being 10 people, it should not last more than five minutes. It’s not a place to go deep in discussions of any sort, technical, support or sales. It’s not a place for details. And it’s definitely not a place for one-to-one communication.
Of course and obviously a team needs more communication than that to function. Much more as a matter of fact! But daily meetings it’s not the right channel. That’s where other channels comes to play. People who work together have their own channels or meetings. For example we developers have a developer chat. We have Teams channels for different subjects and groups.
One question is that why don’t we use them if someone wants to bring something up or ask a question? Why at least some of us find the daily meeting as the best medium for this purpose? Is it because those haven’t had a good experience with Teams? In that case we need to address that, why is that and what can we do about it? Pushing everything into the daily is not the answer.
