Plus an #achievements channel where you make a note of anything you did that was significant (I've also heard this called #whathappened)
I'm doing some consulting on the side (while starting https://getctx.io) and at this client we have a daily physical standup with a video call on Zoom, plus #achievements in Slack.
#achievements works especially well because it gives a persistent, short-form log that people can read quickly when they come back from days off, for instance.
Often they are introduced, because...
...some higher ups have the feeling things aren't going their way.
OR
...some people aren't available for questions somehow and you want to pin them down for at least 10min a day to get some information out of them.
In both cases the stand-up is just a band-aid for deeper issues like missing or broken processes, Miscommunication or simple that no-one cares enough to talk to each other anymore.
If you aim for "transparency" in your process and company culture, I think stand-ups are not intimidating and are not waste of time.
I just think, if such things have to happen synchronously every day, something is going wrong.
Geekbot worked good when people put thought into their reports, which was far from always - a lot of the time it'd be "yesterday: wrote code. today: will write code. blockers: everything is awful" which isn't hugely helpful for team synchronisation. That said, it was a lot better than when we tried using hangouts. With Hangouts we kept running into issues like: not socially acceptable for video conferences at desks in the SF office, and the SF people being in a conference room felt a lot more distant than the remotes on their PCs.
Current team is also distributed (same timezones as previous), but we do a highly structured standup in video conference where everyone is on equal footing signed on a workstation (instead of half being in a conf room).
> Sometimes I see engineers showing up to the standup and having to remember and plan on the go.
Standups are not "iceberg meetings." By having the team prepare for the standup all week you might be discussing things that have been organically solved, or that aren't pertinent to you or the rest of the team. If you care enough about something, you'll remember to bring it up during standup. If you take the old-school 2 hour Monday morning status meeting and call it a standup then you aren't doing standups.
If you need that thorough 2 hour status meeting, abandon agile. Don't put your engineers through the hell of reporting to two status update workflows.
We put our reports up the big screen every day during our in person Standups. Every engineer quickly runs through their work items and it definitely eliminates the whole "having to remember and plan on the go".
As a manager, I also love how it helps me catch up on my teams progress every evening as well.
It's also a team requirement that if for some reason a member cannot make the standup call they record their status in /standup
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We are working on the ability to use both the bot and the channel standups, FWIW.
In my opinion they tend to take a little longer than a traditional standup but we do go more in depth when discussing issues we might be having. Usually it takes 15 minutes.
TBH I always think of standups as being as informal and brief as possible, and physical interaction promotes better comms within the team.
If it's causing real problems, why not suggest a low-tech solution like keeping notes?