A new take on remote/hybrid standups

Couldn’t agree more about scheduled social time. Our standups are usually kept short (15 min or less total) which is usually more than enough and if there’s anything that needs more time then the ones who needs to be involved schedule their own meeting outside of that. We do however have an open Teams chat where people jump in and drop out all through the day just to hang out or throw out simple questions. Even had some nice chats and laughs with coworkers while doing the evening chores.

Great points. I’m the “Nate” quoted in the article, and I have a phrase for contrived social events: “scheduled fun,” which I and most of the engineers I’ve ever worked with have mocked and derided as both 1) not fun, and 2) a waste of time. Being professionals, we do give it our best effort, but a person can only do so many seemingly pointless icebreakers before going nuts.

I’ve been working as a team-lead on fully-remote engineering teams for about seven years now, at three different startups. I’m also a fairly strong introvert. Among my failings as a team-lead is that I would often find myself 5 minutes late to our standups (kids, other meetings, etc). But I noticed something: when I’d join the team would be bullshitting, talking about whatever: new tech, sports, tv/movies, etc.

So when I joined, I didn’t start the standup right away. I just let their conversation go on until a lull and then would say, “Ok, let’s do the standup.” Over time I began to be less worried about showing up late — I knew they would be bullshitting, and they seemed to genuinely enjoy it. I also started noticing side-effects: the team was becoming more open and transparent, willing to engage in needed conflict with less prodding. They were coming to trust one another.

I guess you could call this “unscheduled fun”, in the sense that it was unintentional. There was no agenda, no icebreaker, and no goal. But within a few months, during our retro the team debated whether to put what we literally called “bullshitting” before or after the actual standup. We also debated whether it should be 10 minutes or 20 minutes. No one debated stopping it. And these weren’t strong extroverts. They weren’t necessarily friends. But we had stumbled upon something we liked, all because my kids couldn’t get dressed fast enough in the morning, or my boss couldn’t end our 1-on-1 on time.

It kind of reminds me of my time in the military. I made some really close friends (“comrads” might be a better word) with people that I would never have thought I’d be friends with. Many were just really grating as people. But in retrospect, spending so much time with them in so many painful experiences bonded us together, despite our natural aversion for one another.

Like other commenters point out, with the advent of great tooling for backlogs and asynchronous communication, I really don’t see the point of Scrum standups for a team of adults who are disciplined in using those tools

My experiences are just anecdotal, and maybe aren’t generally applicable to other teams in other situations, but that’s why I recommended to Rally that we try bullshitting before doing our standup.

I honestly can’t say that if instead of being late I’d said “let’s try just bullshitting for 5 minutes before we start standup,” that anyone would have kept a straight face. I imagine 7 faces staring at me with mild to severe annoyance. But I’d say if you can figure out how to do an experiment with bullshitting for 5 minutes before standup (with whatever chat platform), you don’t have a lot to lose. And if what I’ve seen is true beyond my own narrow context, there might be a lot to gain.

interesting. I would have never guessed that our 30m long daily standups where my manager micromanages every minute detail into every person's work was not the best way to go about it. /s

Thank you for this opinion! I completely hear you on forced-socialization ideas. I also understand that there is a place for work and a place for fun. However, I am curious on what you have tried or seen on top performing teams around building camaraderie and coming together - especially when remote.

Fully agree. It's part of the problem we are thinking about. How do we make remote work fun for extroverts while not sidelining others? This was one take at the problem and I really appreciate the feedback you gave :)

LOL we have enough fires burning as it is..

Nice! How long have you been doing this for? Is the team all engineers?

Great feedback. Thank you! Will look into these comments!

Definitely!

They're daily for the reason that if they're not unnecessary, it's possible to react quickly to obstacles.

In the ideal case, if everyone just says "yep, still working on that feature, I see no obstacles, next", standups can last 3 minutes.

In the case where someone says "I'm blocked by a PR by Geoff from Team B" for 2 days straight, the team knows to step in.