It’s 9am. You’ve just made your coffee. You’re ready to be productive. Then your calendar reminds you that you have standup in five minutes. You sigh, open the video call, and wait for everyone to trickle in over the next seven minutes while Dave figures out why his microphone isn’t working again.
Finally, the ritual begins. Sarah goes first. “Yesterday I worked on the API stuff, today I’m continuing with the API stuff, no blockers.” Fantastic. Groundbreaking information. Absolutely could not have been a single line of text.
Then it’s your turn. “Nothing new from me, thanks.” You’ve now contributed exactly zero value but burned fifteen minutes getting here. Your coffee is cold.
This is not a standup. This is a hostage situation with better lighting.
The original idea behind a standup was sound. Get the team together, quickly sync on what everyone’s doing, identify blockers, move on. Fifteen minutes, max. The name literally comes from the idea that if you’re standing, you’ll keep it short because your legs will get tired.
Somewhere along the way, we decided to do standups sitting down, on video calls, with people spread across five different timezones. We kept the name but lost the plot entirely.
If your team is distributed, a synchronous standup is an act of cruelty disguised as process. Someone is always joining at an unreasonable hour. Someone is always distracted because it’s their lunch time. Someone is always on mute when they shouldn’t be, or not on mute when they definitely should be (we can hear you chewing, Marcus).
The worst offenders are the companies that have turned standups into social hour. “Let’s just do a quick round of how everyone’s weekend was!” No. Absolutely not. I will tell you about my weekend over beers, not in a mandatory work ritual at 9am on a Monday. If your standup regularly exceeds fifteen minutes, congratulations, you’ve invented a meeting and called it something else.
This is mismanagement wearing the costume of agile methodology.
The fix is embarrassingly simple: make standups async. Everyone posts their update in a Slack channel at the start of their workday. Done. Finished. No calendar invite required.
“Yesterday I worked on X. Today I’m working on Y. No blockers.” That’s three lines of text. It takes thirty seconds to write and ten seconds to read. Multiply that by a team of eight and you’ve spent maybe two minutes instead of thirty. That’s twenty-eight minutes of your life back. Every single day.
But wait, I hear you say, what about the human connection? What about team bonding? What about seeing each other’s faces?
Great questions. Here’s the thing: a standup was never supposed to be about human connection. It’s a status update. If you want team bonding, schedule actual team bonding activities. Don’t try to smuggle socialising into a process meeting and wonder why nobody seems engaged.
You know what builds better team connection than forced small talk at 9am? Actually having time to do your work because you’re not trapped in unnecessary synchronous ceremonies.
The async standup also solves the timezone problem completely. Your teammate in Berlin posts their update at their 9am. Your teammate in Brisbane posts theirs at their 9am. Everyone reads updates when it suits them. Nobody is waking up at 6am to hear Dave say “no blockers” with a pixelated video feed.
There’s a manager somewhere reading this and panicking. “But how will I know if people are actually working?” Mate, if you need a daily video call to confirm your team is working, you have a trust problem, not a standup problem. Fix that instead.
Some teams genuinely need synchronous standups. If you’re doing pair programming, if you’re in the middle of a crisis, if you have complex dependencies that require real-time coordination, fine. Have your call. But that should be the exception, not the default.
For most teams, most of the time, the daily standup call is a ritual we keep doing because we’ve always done it. It’s cargo cult agile. We saw successful teams do standups, assumed the standup was causing the success, and copied the format without understanding the purpose.
The purpose is communication, not ceremony. If you can communicate the same information in less time with less friction, you should. Async standups do exactly that.
Post your three lines in Slack. Read what your teammates posted. Flag anything that needs discussion in a thread. Move on with your day. Save the video calls for things that actually require video calls.
Your cold coffee will thank you. Dave’s microphone still won’t work, but at least you won’t have to hear about it.