Morning daily huddles are the most productive meeting that you will have with your team: it is important to keep everyone motivated.
The huddle is not to plan your week or your ongoing project. Its goal is to check in, with other team members, about what your day will look like, sharing good news, alerts and the Top One priority for the day.
Unfortunately, many times, daily huddles turn to regular meetings in which two team members talk about their problems, or they tend to speak too much and don’t summarize when they mention their priority of the day.
So, how can we make ours huddles more rewarding, useful and, the most important, interesting to keep all the team motivated? A few actions we perform in our Customer Success Leader (CSL) daily huddles are explained below.
Designate Roles
There must be a huddle leader. It can always be the same person or it can rotate every week between the team members. Leaders should ensure that the meeting starts and ends on time and should give other team members the opportunity to speak up when necessary. Moreover, they should keep huddles short and focused, perhaps by putting bigger issues in a “parking lot” until they can be discussed at a different forum or meeting.
Organization
Using a web conference tool will help us to get all connected while we are in different cities or on a business trip. Huddles must start at the time they are settled with a specific order, so everyone knows when they have to talk and what to say. E.g.: CSLs Huddle starts every day at 10:45 with three main topics to talk about. First, Good News, in which every team member share the good news from the day before. Second, Alerts. It is important to share with the rest of the team the actions in which we need help, and from whom. And finally, our Top Priority. It will be the main action that we must achieve in the day.
The leader can use a template to keep the conversation concise and focused.
Enjoying Daily Huddles
For teams that work remotely, daily huddles are sometimes the only moment they share together. So it must be valuable for all, and one way to motivate them is turning our cameras on, to see each other faces while talking. If the huddle ends on time and you still have time in our slot, telling a joke is the best way to make everyone smile and start the day with a different attitude, it doesn’t matter if the joke is bad (most of the time they are). Furthermore, Fridays are the happy day by excellence, and everyone loves this day, so starting the huddle with 30 seconds of a song (especially reggaeton) will help us to be full of energy in the huddle.
Last but not least, at particular dates, such as Halloween, using hats or masks could be a great idea, or make one thematic huddle and show our pets on camera.
The team will remain enthusiastic about huddles if they continue to provide value. Focus on improving them so that they provide clear benefits for the team. There are many initiatives that we can perform to have more efficient, valuable and rewarding huddles. A good dose of humor is always a plus, but don’t forget that this is a team working huddle. All actions should be respectful for the rest of the team.
