With more people working remotely, the need for regular meetings between teams is more important than ever. However, a weekly diary packed with unproductive meetings can do more harm than good. If your weekly get-togethers are doing nothing more distracting your teams from to-do list, it’s time to embrace the daily huddle.
Sometimes referred to as stand-up meetings, daily huddles make it easy for teams to connect, consult, and coordinate. There’s no room for overlong runtimes and agendas here. Is this your first time exploring the benefits of the huddle? We’ve put together a list of daily huddle ideas you can start putting into practice today.
Are Meetings and Huddles the Same Thing?
Although daily team huddles are technically a kind of meeting, they’re far less formal. With a team meeting, people gather to discuss a particular agenda or set topics. They typically involve large groups of employees and can take many people away from more pressing tasks. Some examples include quarterly planning meetings, all hands meetings, etc.
Team huddles are more streamlined in every way. As well as being short, the tone is casual. What’s more, they tend to only include people who are actively working together, such as a tight knit department or project team. During a team huddle, participants can share urgent information or brainstorm solutions to potential problems.
Why You Should Be Hosting Team Huddles
If you’re worried about the efficiency of an online team, morning huddles make total sense. Even though these bite-sized meetings are brief, they’re ideal for aligning disparate teams and encouraging effective team communication and coordination.
Do your remote workers struggle to prioritize certain tasks? With daily huddles, there’s less chance of someone spending precious hours on a relatively minor task when they could be focusing on something more important.
As they’re less formal than a standard meeting, huddles can be incredibly democratic. Everyone is encouraged to offer their opinions, which can give less outgoing members of a team the confidence to contribute. For ideas on how to make your daily huddles fun, check out these ice breaking games, as well as these music-infused team activities.
Even though a huddle is designed for teams to share insights and concerns, they’ll ultimately help your employees develop as independent problem-solvers who have no trouble rising to a challenge.
5 Tips for Amazing Daily Huddles
Looking to make daily huddles a mainstay of your operation? Below are few daily huddle ideas that are worth a try:
1. Keep Things Simple
If it’s a busy time for your business and your teams are in the middle of a major project, it’s tempting to cram as much information as possible into a meeting. While it makes sense to prepare a lightweight agenda, the goal of a huddle is to get everyone on the same page, identify problems, and renew focus. If points are raised during a huddle that need to be discussed in more detail, schedule a separate event for this.
2. Start and End Your Huddle on Time
There’s no point hosting a huddle if people are going to arrive late and you’re constantly overrunning. Most businesses schedule huddles for the morning at the start of the working day. Make sure your start time is locked down and you commit to it. Even if everyone hasn’t assembled yet, don’t be afraid to get your huddle underway.
You’ll want to keep an eye on the time. If your huddle is only going to last for 15 minutes, set a countdown timer so you know when to wrap things up. This applies even if you’ve prepared a barebones agenda or certain priority topics are brought into play.
Timing can prove tricky if you’re experimenting with huddles for the first time. However, the more huddles you host and more meticulous you are with timing, the more familiar it will start to seem.
3. Think About Engagement
Although daily huddles are far more concentrated than your average meeting, you should still find time to boost employee engagement with activities. You won’t have time for anything too substantial here, but a quick team building ice breaker can help get the ball rolling.
There’s also scope for spotlighting your success. If individual employees or teams are excelling, give them a shoutout. As well as raising morale and motivation levels, you’re underlining that everyone’s on the right track to meet those project milestones.
4. Play Around with Huddle Frequency
While many businesses find hosting a daily huddle useful, you don’t have to start every morning with one. If you don’t feel that there’s enough new information to warrant a daily huddle, there’s no really no point taking people away from their work, even if it is only for 10 minutes or so.
If you only need to gather two or three times a week, there’s nothing stopping you playing around with daily huddle schedules. Experiment with the frequency of your huddles to see what works best for you. If you like less frequent meetings, you can also opt for a Monday team meeting.
5. Stick to a Huddle Agenda
Whether you’re meeting for five or 15 minutes, having a huddle agenda in place is a good idea. These don’t need to be as involved as regular meeting agendas. Allow a couple of minutes for introductions and questions, then quickly move on to talk about everyone’s focus areas. Check out our personal meeting room template.
Once you’ve determined what everyone will be doing for the next day, underline any recent successes. With that out of the way, you can move on to any problems that need solving. A five-minute brainstorming session should prove more than sufficient for everyone in the huddle to offer potential solutions.
What Are the Benefits of Team Huddles?
There are many reasons to consider scheduling a daily huddle. The obvious benefit is that everyone has the opportunity to ask about recent project developments and plans that would otherwise be missed. This saves you from having to rely on multiple email chains to share information.
What’s more, you can use huddles to reinforce expectations. By reminding employees of what’s required of them, you can maintain high levels of productivity (after all, we can’t be hosting virtual holiday parties all the time, right?).
Huddles also give you a chance to provide steady updates about project progress. When working on large projects, it’s easy for milestones to seem a long way away and unattainable. When you host daily huddles, you’re offering a constant reminder that goals are within sight.
Additionally, huddles reinforce a sense of community between your teams. Remote employees who touch base every day in a huddle are far more likely to reach out and request insights and support from colleagues when they need.
When you stick to a tight schedule and make huddles a daily occurrence, you’ll start to reap the benefits. Huddles are a great motivator, encouraging employees to think outside the box and giving them the confidence to share their ideas with the people they work with. Once huddles become a staple of your operation, you’ll wonder how you ever did without them.
Can a Daily Huddle Work Virtually?
Although you’ll find many companies hosting daily huddles in traditional workplace settings, they’re incredibly well-suited to the virtual world. Thanks to their shorter length and simple structure, all you really need is a reliable video conferencing platform and you’re good to go.
Thinking of making daily huddles a staple of your operation? With Gloww, you have a full-featured platform with all the tools you need to keep your teams on track and focused on the day ahead. Need to schedule a more substantial get-together? Whether it’s an all-hands session or quarterly event, you can make those online meetings more engaging than ever with Gloww’s interactive features and collaboration tools.
Unlock the Power of Daily Huddles with Gloww
If you’re tired of wasting countless hours every month on pointless meetings, it’s time to ditch the usual agendas and say hello to the daily huddle. Perfect for bringing everyone up to speed and realigning team members, huddles help you identify issues before they become a real problem. Furthermore, they can inspire proactivity and confidence in your remote employees. We also have an article on productive team meeting agendas, if that’s more your thing.
Need a video conferencing solution that can host your daily huddles? Gloww is the perfect platform. With a huge selection of ready-made templates, you can keep your huddles as streamlined or feature-rich as you wish. Stick to an ironclad agenda to ensure everyone’s on the same page, or include an icebreaker or two so that team building isn’t left by the wayside.
If you’re ready to schedule your first daily huddle, you can get started with Gloww today. Interested in using Gloww for other virtual events and meetings with your remote teams? Have a look at our pricing plans to learn more about Gloww’s advanced features. If you still have questions about the platform, feel free to contact the team for answers.
