Run effective standup meetings, remotely

#1 - Kaapi

Kaapi is a simple tool to automate your standup meetings. All you need to do is invite your team and then Kaapi will take it from there. At a pre-defined time it will checkin with the team on their status update for the day. It will then collect all the answers and create a report. You also get additional features like

• Fun team building activities
• Team morale checkins
• Meeting routines e.g. monthly sales review, weekly status report, yearly performance reviews etc.

‍#2 - Geekbot

Geekbot is available for both MS Teams and Slack. It has an exhaustive set of features. You can use it not just for collecting automatic status updates for your daily standups, but also track team morale. You can also store meeting notes, run retrospectives, and get reports on which team members are less engaged.

‍#3 - Dailybot

DailyBot gives you a set of tools for async work and collaboration: daily standups, team check-ins, surveys, kudos, virtual watercooler, 1:1 intros, motivation tracking and more. It's one of the only tools that's available on Google Chat too. Run async and written updates, agile daily stand-ups, retrospectives, or periodic check-ins like 1:1s. Track automatically what your team is up to. Identify bottlenecks and help those who are blocked, regardless of their location or time zone.

#4 - Range

Use Range to add async check-ins, daily teambuilding, and integrated apps to your standup—make your daily meeting more fun and effective. With written updates, your team can easily see what's happening whenever they start their day. The best part is their integration with 10+ apps to pull in tasks and project status from there.

‍#5 - Status Hero

This is a new one on the block. It is a standup tool that turns async check-ins and project management data into concise, insightful reports. It does a really good job of pulling in status updates from tools like Zoom, Github and Jira - a fantastic combo for tech teams!

#6 - Friday

Friday positions itself as an OS for remote work. You can plan your own day, stay in sync with your team and have fewer better meetings. You can also add powerups like Goals, Icebreakers and Kudos to engage in a holistic way with your team.

#7 - Standuply

Standuply is a project management assistant. It's app gives you standup meetings, retrospectives, internal help desk and team mood check-ins too. There is no web app sign up though - you can only use it via MS Teams or Slack. You can also run full team surveys via Standuply for the one off questionnaires.

It should be customisable 

Every team has their own process to conduct standup meetings, and a good tool should be adaptable to those. I have seen too many rigid tools in the market that only work well if used in a certain way. Stay away from those! 

You should be able to easily change timings of your standup (both daily or weekly!), note making formats and manage your team members. 

A good standup meeting app should be asynchronous

This is doubly important for remote teams! You can not always run around scheduling meetings across extreme timezones. And hence the team members should be able to update their work progress at their own comfort. Having a simple chat based reminder and note making tool helps! 

It should be easy to set up

Balancing features that allow for customization with ease of use can get difficult! And that is why you choose your standup tool carefully. You don’t want to get lost in a steep learning curve post installation. Your team should also find it really easy to fill their work status updates. 

It should integrate with your existing tools

You are most probably already using tools like Jira to manage bugs, or Slack to chat within the team. The standup meeting tool you choose should easily be able to live within these tools, instead of forcing you exclusively into its own ecosystem. 

It should generate good standup meeting reports

As a team leader, or a scrum master, it is important that you have a bird’s eye view of the entire team. Who is blocked? Does anyone need help? A beautiful, simple tabular summarisation of the standup meeting really helps in this case. If the tool of your choice does not have this, the meetings can get confusing and the team will lose trust in the systems that you are trying to set up. This issue compounds if you are a fast growing team of more than 5 people.