Async vs Sync standups

What are stand ups?

Stand-ups are timeboxed meetings where attendees generally participate while standing (hence the name!). Standups are used to deliver daily updates on a week's or sprint’s tasks to the entire team. The daily nature of stand-ups allow participants to understand how tasks are progressing in the team, who needs help, and how to coordinate the efforts of the team to align and complete tasks successfully. The structure of the meetings encourages follow-ups and tries to identify issues and blockers before their impact reaches a larger scale.

The structure of stand ups

Stand-ups are generally conducted in the three question format:

What did I complete yesterday?

What am I working on today?

Am I blocked on anything?

The first two questions provide visibility into a teammate’s efforts and contributions and help in understanding the impact of daily tasks and efforts in a team’s progress towards set goals.. The third question is used to identify any tasks that might require the team’s inputs or a manager’s intervention or better resource allocation or other tasks that need to be completed before the current one can begin.

Issues with traditional standup calls in the hybrid workplace

With the advent of distributed teams, stand up calls started moving online and with the covid-19 pandemic pushing all teams to work from home, virtual stand up calls started playing a much more important role around which teams’ daily activities revolved around. Some of the issues are:

Scheduling across time zones

A stand up meeting is synchronous in nature and it mandates that all team members be present and active for the benefit of the entire team. This introduces the challenge of finding a suitable time for geographically distributed team members to attend the stand-up. Most often, in teams that are dispersed across time zones, this results in some team members are always on, sacrificing their personal time or even staying up after work hours, or later than they’d like for the sake of the call.

Disturbs focus time

One of the most productive processes followed by asynchronous teams around the world is called deep work. Deep work is a practice where people allocate “focus time” to concentrate and work on one, cognitively demanding task, without any interruptions or context switches. Since the time every individual allocates for deep work can vary through the course of a day, it becomes inevitable that a stand-up meeting in distributed teams can fall within a team members’ focus time. Such interruptions and context switches can reflect as a dip in productivity and lower quality of work.

Time consuming

The primary intention of having ‘stand up’ meetings was to stand around so that the meeting does not get extended to long durations of time. With the move to virtual meetings, stand up calls have strayed away from its founding principle and often stretch out longer than planned timeboxes and have the potential to eat away at the productive time of the team members.

Additionally, prolonged meetings also mean that managers would find it very hard to keep track of everyone's progress, and more importantly the blockers and the necessary steps to be taken afterward - all of which can slip through as a result of having long and tedious meetings.

New age problems require new age solutions

Distributed and remote teams are adept at working asynchronously, adopting digital tools to aid their tasks, facilitate communication and collaboration, and support their productive work. This means the stand up calls need not be conducted via video calls, rather can be flawlessly adopted to asynchronous work principles where stand up reports can be exchanged within the team via the same tools teams use to communicate with each other. The three question format that stand-ups use can be maintained and the reports can be published in group channels for all concerned team members to stay apprised. Other advantages of asynchronous stand-ups are:

Asynchronous stand ups don’t require every team member to report at the same time and so it is very mindful of every member’s work hours. It successfully mitigates the challenge of scheduling across time zones without compromising team participation, engagement, and cohesion.

Transparent and thorough documentation is a great benefit of asynchronous stand ups as all stand up reports are published on a common channel. This not only means that other team members can use the inputs from stand up reports at a later point but also means that managers can study each update and devise any necessary actions after careful review.

Another great benefit of asynchronous stand ups is the opportunity to avoid video calls, thus saving time and preserving a team’s digital well-being. This also avoids the pitfalls of context switching and the time gained can be utilized for other challenging tasks or as personal breaks all of which can lead to better productivity and well-being.

Power-up asynchronous stand-ups with Hatica

Hatica’s async stand up tool integrates with Slack, Microsoft teams or via email and can be configured to collect stand up reports from the team. Additionally, Hatica integrates with project management tools, Git/VCS apps, and incident management apps to collect, organize, and analyze data from all corners of the digital workplace to give leaders and managers a more comprehensive view of what work is being done, what bottlenecks block progress, and how leaders can help improve the overall well-being of employees.

This holistic approach to work can empower leaders and managers to optimize their processes, and more importantly take better care of their employees’ well-being all while running their teams efficiently.