6 weeks of async standup meetings

In my blog I shared with you my recent experiment with async standup meetings in Slack in my own company. Here I would like to update you on how it goes.

6 weeks ago, I decided to test async standup meetings using Slack within Voxloud teams.

I shared in this article how to set up the standup slack workflow in a past issue. The main reason why I decided to reduce calls in favor of chats was the one below:

The bigger the remote team, the lower the participants' attention level.

After 6 weeks of practice, we are happy: We got used to this new framework. We won't come back.

We went async with two teams: development and administration. Support and sales standups will remain full-live, at least for the moment. Standups are now handled in chat every morning, but we are still keeping few conference calls. Async is great, but never forget that we are humans.. it's crucial to keep human relationships :) Development is running two live meetings per week, while the administration is running just one per week. With developers, we saw that is better to jump more often in the call. It's essential to keep the proper order of tasks in the TODO column of the scrum board. In-call is simpler. This is helping us reach the development goals more constantly. With the administration team, instead, 1 live meeting is acceptable. To be honest, we could also go with 0 live standup meetings. But we want to keep at least one "human touch" every week. The lesson I learned after 6 weeks is simple:

There is no law nor a predefined recipe. It's all about testing.

Get feedback from teammates, apply chances, and get results.

I strongly suggest you test async standups. If you need some help, reach out. I'll be happy to help!