Daily stand ups are an integral part of every high-performing team. They get everyone on the same page, help remove roadblocks and build trust. If you are looking at the best ways to run daily standup meetings; using a good report template is the first step. A good daily standup meeting template should:

• Highlight blockers - Your template should make it easy for team members to input their blockers. And ask for help if they need from other team members.
• Not be a meeting, unless needed - Everyone should send their updates in advance! Use the standup meeting only for important talking points. Even if you are doing the meeting for only 10 minutes, in a team of 5 people, that is collectively an hour wasted. Still not convinced? Read about the 'importance' of standup meetings here.
• Should have a central owner - That is usually the team leader or scrum master. Otherwise people who need help, or issues that need to be looked into will go unnoticed. 
• Asynchronous -  I have said this before, but lemme stress a bit more! You MUST adopt this way to work remotely successfully. Doing such meetings in an async way (vs calling a Zoom meeting) will help you save a lot of time.

Some of the usual topics that are included in the template are:

What did you work on yesterday?

People should ideally report this using simple and easy to understand bullet points. In case those tasks resulted in achievements or failures, that should be reported. Even best is to include metrics in your update too. A great status update for a daily standup meeting template looks like this:

I shipped a new load-balancer feature in the evening that made our app performance better. The app now loads 9% faster than before!

What are your plans for today?

Similarly to the one above, you should use this one to very concisely describe what tasks you are picking up today. Be both goal oriented and input driven e.g. 

I want to write two popular topic blog articles, which should start giving us minimum 100 new visitors a day next quarter

Do you need any help? Any blockers?

In many ways, this is the most important question of a daily standup template, and deservedly so. If you are the owner of the meeting, or the team leader, you should keep a sharp eye on this column. This is how people report the areas where they need help from others! Not resolving these issues not only leads to stuck projects, but also low morale. 

I need the tech team to give me the latest dynamic sitemap to submit to Google Search Console.

Optional - Shoutouts

Use this column to encourage your team members to recognise great work! Daily work can sometimes get hectic, and this is a great way to build some extra team bonding. 

Optional - Icebreakers

If your daily standup meetings are getting too boring, break the ice with some fun questions! Some good Icebreaker questions for virtual meetings are:

• Would you show everyone in this meeting your browser history?
• What coffee do you drink in your morning meeting?
• What are your top three favourite phone apps?
• What’s your best “my coworkers are crazy” story?
• What is your biggest distraction while working from home?

PS - Automate the process of sending Icebreakers to your team with our free Icebreakers tool.

Other templates

Progress, Problems, Plans

I am personally a fan of this one. It can be a great template to summarise how everyone in the team is doing and what they are up to.

Start, stop, continue

Another great format for daily standup! It has three simple questions that you ask your team -

• What should we start doing that we are not doing today?
• What should we stop doing that is not working?
• What should we continue? What should we double down on?

Daily scrum

Don't forget that these kind of templates are perfect for scrum templates!

How to run a good daily standup meeting 

• Think about morning vs evening - Some teams also call these sunrise & sunset meetings. This really depends on your team culture, so choose wisely. Some people prefer to plan for the next day in the evening, whereas others prefer to do the same early morning before they start work. 
• Don’t include too many questions - I have seen managers include too many questions sometimes, but anything more than 3 to 4 is an overkill. Stick to using this template as a quick summary of the day. 
• Give good infrastructure to your remote team - You should do your best to provide good internet connectivity, laptops and web cameras to your team. And not just that, you should also spend some time in training and exciting people about these processes. ‍
• Focus on what, how and how - If there is a point of contention and debate regarding a task (e.g. should we fix this bug today), and the discussion is going for a long time, you should ask for a sidebar. Encourage the involved people to meet separately and solve it out!