Daily Huddle Meetings - How To Boost Your Team’s Efficiency Without Taking Up Time

When waking up on a Monday morning, the last thing most people want to see is an hour-long catch-up that covers everything they need to know for the whole week. Not only is this a surefire way to bore your team members before the week has even started, but you’ll also be taking the wind out of their sales by adding a lot of work to their plates all at once.

An alternative way of giving each team member information without taking up too much of their time is by holding a daily huddle meeting. These meetings will only last around 15 minutes, quickly covering everything that your team needs to get done that day. This quick face-to-face forum will provide everyone the opportunity to know exactly what they’re doing without sapping employee engagement.

In this article, we’ll be covering the best daily huddle meeting practices, allowing your team members to get the maximum benefit from this often overlooked meeting type.

• What are the benefits of team huddles?
• What are the structures of a daily team huddle?
• Tips for success in your daily huddles

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What are the benefits of team huddles?

A team huddle is a rapid format meeting, flying through main objectives and letting everyone get back to their working day as quickly as possible. Within this 15 minute format you’ll be able to cover a lot of information. 

Here are four benefits of this format:

• Speed - Only taking 15 minutes, this meeting is a tiny portion of your working day that can have a big impact on employee engagement.
  

• Unity - Socializing is important, with the team huddle giving everyone an opportunity to say hello to team members they might not see as often. This is especially important for remote teams.
  

• Immediacy - In a team huddle, you’ll be touching on the most important aspects of your day. Due to this, a sense of immediacy is created as everyone knows what they should be achieving that day.
  

• Alignment - One benefit of daily huddles is that they increase alignment across your teams. They help everyone stay focused while also understanding what their other colleagues are doing to work towards the current company goals. 
  

Alongside this, daily huddles are also invaluable for keeping everyone in the loop. While an email can feel impersonal, this fast meeting can provide a great alternative when wanting to share department updates. You may also use daily meetings to allow team members to share new ideas or ways to improve your processes.

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What are the structures of a daily team huddle?

A daily huddle meeting template should follow the same few central points. These agenda items will ensure that everyone knows what they are doing, is clear about strategic goals they are working towards, and has the opportunity to say hello to their colleagues.

There are five sections to a team meeting, each one only taking between 1-3 minutes:

• Accomplishments from yesterday - Quickly cover the previous day, highlight any breakthroughs and give the team some positive feedback.
• Top priorities of today for different members - Go around the circle and allow everyone to speak and share what their number one priority is today. 
• Any company/people updates - If anything happened in the business as a whole overnight, you could share the company news in this report.
• Quick questions - As with most meetings, a quick foray into ‘Any Questions’ will allow your team to bring up any big issues they’re facing. If they can’t be fixed quickly, schedule a further meeting with that employee to save time for the rest of your team.
• Break - Say your goodbyes and send everyone off to hit the first task on their agenda.
  

By speeding through these sections and keeping time limits, you’ll be able to make sure that your team gets all the information they need without a big-time commitment.

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Tips for success in your daily huddles

Once you’ve got your general structure down, you’ll be well on your way to running a team huddle that hits all the key points. That said, here are five tips that you can incorporate to ensure that your daily huddle goes off without a hitch.

We’ll be touching on:

• Give everyone a chance to speak
• Have people stand
• Do not plan projects, only use action items
• Stay on topic
• Morning Huddles
  

Let’s break these down further.

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Chance To Speak

One of the vital reasons that daily huddles are so effective is that it allows your team to bond, get to know each other face-to-face, and have a shared moment of discussion. These regular meetings will ensure that everyone builds up a level of familiarity with each other while also getting the opportunity to hear essential information.

Additionally, if you have any shy team members that are less confident at talking in the group, then the daily basis of these meetings will ensure that they can build up their confidence over time. 

Stand Up

Standing up in meetings can reduce your meeting times by up to 25%, keeping everyone streamlined and on their way towards hitting their goals. By standing up in meetings, you ensure that (in the best way possible), no one gets too comfy.

This scrum format inspires speed, ensuring that all the points that matter from the agenda are hit in an efficient manner. One of your central ground rules for success is that everyone stands. After all, no one is going to want to stand for 30 minutes, meaning that everyone has it in their best interest to keep the huddle short and sweet.

Action Items Only

The key difference between a scrum meeting and a weekly team meeting is that due to their shorter timeframe, you’ll mainly be focusing on action items. Instead of brainstorming how to tackle a larger project, these short meetings will have you laying out what needs to be done today to keep your productive team on track. 

If one of your team members starts to bring up a topic that is going to take more than just a few minutes, you’re better off tabling this until a different meeting. Alternatively, you can offer to meet with them directly afterward to ensure your other team members don’t have to wait through an issue that might not impact them.

To keep your entire team on the right track, make sure your daily huddle hits your action items and swiftly concludes, carrying that forward momentum onward.

Stay on Topic

This one is slightly more obvious but a tip that is often overlooked. If you start greeting your team and then move on to how everyone’s weekend was, you’ll be wasting precious time. To keep your daily huddle agenda short and sweet, be sure to skip over the majority of the niceties and aim to hit your key discussion points.

If anyone seems to be veering off course towards topics that don’t concern the whole team, then politely guide them back on track. If this is your first time running a daily huddle, then be sure to outline what you want the meetings to achieve so that your employees are on the same page before going in.

Once you’ve conducted a few, everyone will be well on their way to being experts.

Morning Huddles

The very best time to run a daily huddle is first thing in the morning. Placing the daily huddle here will allow everyone to clarify what they’re focusing on for that day, giving them a boost of motivation and a clear trajectory for the day.

While some companies like to use their daily huddle in the early afternoon to touch on what people have done that day, these meetings can often get in the way of things. Additionally, if someone is working on a larger aspect of a project and are asked to give an update every single afternoon, they might feel unnecessary pressure to finish something that simply takes more than a morning.

Additionally, if an employee isn’t quite sure what they should be working on that day, the morning huddle will set them on the right pathway. As a team leader, you don’t want to be leaving anyone in the dark about their objectives, making this a fantastic way to ensure everyone feels confident about the work they have to do that day.

Final Thoughts

Daily huddles are one of the most effective ways that you can help your team excel every single day without wasting a whole lot of time. These 15-minute sessions will ensure that your team knows what they need to work on that day, is up to date with any company information that was just released, and has an outlet to talk to if they’re feeling stressed.

While team huddles aren’t the right playground to plan new projects in, they provide a great forum for sharing progress and saving time. If you’re looking to incorporate daily huddles into your team structures, then take a look our meeting template library!