Everyone deserves to feel safe. And everyone deserves to feel like they’re winning. Now that most of our teams work from home, having a daily huddle will help keep everyone aligned and connected. But how do you do a huddle well?
The entire play for us in GoTeam has always been about driving engagement and morale. As a leader, you can influence this with your energy when you see people (in the hallways, meeting rooms, and other shared spaces) on a daily basis.
Shift this to remotely distributed teams, locally or internationally, and you have a new problem to solve.
For example, if you want to drive a culture of execution where people feel like they are winning, the team needs to be in a weekly accountability session. But shift to working from home, where people are not just remote, they risk being in isolation…then, you need to increase the cadence from weekly to daily.
The problem is, and by now you would have experienced this, running a well-executed daily or weekly huddle online via Zoom sounds simple, but is not so easy.
Let’s get brutally honest here, most of us will really suck at this at first. That is, unless we have a framework and the right tools to make it happen.
Here are 5 key steps in the daily huddle framework:
- Same time, same place every day.
- Restate the team manifesto or purpose statement out loud.
- Each person gets 2 to 3 minutes to restate their top goal and share their Top 3 priorities from yesterday and their Top 3 priorities for today.
- Check for roadblocks.
- Give encouragement.
It’s a simple structure, but when you try to put it into practice on Zoom, it can quickly fall apart without the right tool. We couldn’t find that right tool, so we built it.
Our huddle boards live in the entrepreneurial operating system dothis.to.
And here is how it plays out:
- Same time, same place every day: The team gets sent a link each day which, with one click, takes them to an online Huddle Board where the audio connects instantly. Everyone sees the shared huddle board that updates in real time.
- One person reads out loud the manifesto, which is one click away. The tip here is to take turns with each session so we hear the commitment in the voice of each person at least once every two weeks. I cannot begin to express just how powerful this is.
- Then, each person gets 2 to 3 minutes to restate their top goal and share their Top 3 priorities from yesterday and their Top 3 priorities for today. We have all of these visualised on a board. What’s cool is that when people take turns, everyone’s screens update. So you are glued to the screen, watching what is about to unfold next. Best of all, because you can see the items on the screen, you don’t have that typical attention drop-off that occurs in people when they are not speaking.
- Each person shares if they have any roadblocks, so we can see who could help clear a path.
- Then finally, and absolutely best of all, we give encouragement, but not the way most do. If you have ever been on a Zoom call, where everyone is muted, then you would have felt how dead and stale they can feel when there is no acknowledgement for progress… or even if people wanted to…they hold back, because of the awkwardness that happens when someone speaks and breaks the timing of the presenter.
The challenge here is that people are already starved for human interaction. They are craving acknowledgement and so the Zoom meeting or conference call is not the right tool for these meetings.
We have used this COVID-19 period to not let a good crisis go to waste and we have doubled down on building a huddle board to help virtual teams with the systems they need to drive engagement and morale.
What we have done is build in the ability to acknowledge your teammate using emojis during the huddle. We give each other likes, hearts, fist bumps and even brain emojis when someone has contributed something really clever. The powerful thing is, this acknowledgement releases dopamine and shows that the team cares.
Stephen Covey said, “The fastest way to connect to another human being is to listen.” When we use an emoji in this way, we are showing instantly that we are listening and acknowledging the other’s contribution.
It is so simple and powerful and now it is easy.
If you would like a copy of the framework and free access to the huddle board, head on over to https://go.team/fionakesby and there will be a range of items there for you, including resources on the brain you can use with your team.
If you know that the right thing to do is to have daily or weekly meetings and you know that there’s got to be a better way to do it and drive engagement and morale, then you are going to love what we have built for you. It’s going to change the way you have remote team meetings forever!
About GoTeam (formerly Go Virtual Assistants)
GoTeam, formerly GO Virtual Assistants (GO-VA) Inc. is a registered Australian-Filipino owned company growing in the heart of Cebu City, as well as a growing number of key cities in the Philippines.
Our HQ is situated in an IT complex with modern facilities, although since March 2020, more than 70% of our team members have been working from home.
Our enhanced operations and streamlined services provide scalable opportunities that spell sustainability, growth, and success for any business venture. As your global team members, GoTeam’s goal is to create winnable games and strategies across all the work that we do, knowing that your success is our long-term fulfillment.
We help Australian, NZ, US, and UK businesses increase revenue, reduce costs, and scale through outsourced offshoring. This also creates for us the opportunity to be a catalyst for people to exceed.
AU (+61) 2 7227 8809
US (+1) 302 207 2767
PH (+63) 032 238 7448
9th Flr, i1 Bldg, Jose Ma. del Mar St, IT Park,
Cebu City, Philippines 6000
Website: https://go.team
Careers: https://go.team/ph
Email: sales@go.team
Email: careers@go.team
