Pizza Day: Here’s How To Make Your Weekly Standup A Must Attend

Weekly standups are the perfect opportunity to come together as a team, reflect on progress, help your fellow colleagues and create a stronger connection with other departments.
 
Yet, this can be quite difficult to tackle since it’s very easy to turn an easy breezy and fulfilling stand up into a waste of time. 
Here’s our recipe for (hopefully) success:
 

Define Your Weekly Meeting Goals

We’re a software development company which means that a big percentage of our workforce is completely focused on writing good code. That said, it’s quite tricky to be aware of what other players might be doing, such as the sales and marketing department. One of our main goals is conducting a direct contact between the developers, our general manager and the marketing team. Not only is it positive to be able to understand where we stand regarding sales and potential projects, but we can also hear the developers feedback regarding team activities, events and other company’s work culture related subjects. 

Be Prepared 

You’re not Rambo, so don’t be overly confident and show up at a meeting without a plan. Make sure the project teams nominate a speaker to represent them and take the time to arrange and prepare the topics they want to discuss during the weekly stand up.
Don’t ramble on: prioritize topics and if there’s something more time consuming that should be discussed offline, speak directly with your team manager.

Don’t Be Afraid To Ask Questions

Weekly meetings are the perfect excuse to get in touch with other perspectives and ask your colleagues for advice. This is the time to ask for their input!

Always Consider The Long Term Benefits

Action oriented meetings are focused on addressing key issues and making decisions, tackling several problems right on the spot. Workers will feel more connected and up to date  with everything that’s going on, even if it has nothing to do with their department. This will guarantee that all of you are working towards the same goal!

Spice It Up!

We wanted to make sure our team would be looking forward to our weekly meeting and after some brainstorming, we found something that would definitely work with everyone in the office: pizza. The lunch is on the company and everyone is able to indulge and lay out some updates at the same time, followed by a full hour lunch break, since informal settings are great to comfortably discuss issues that might have surfaced.

So, in short, if you want to hold a successful meeting, make sure you bring some food to the office. Or don’t. This works for us but we’d definitely recommend you to find a way to make your weekly stand up more interesting, and although pizza is usually a universal good idea, there’s plenty of things you can do, like a video game championship right after the meeting, or just show up with a good old and delicious box of freshly made donuts.

Do you have any personal tips you’d like to share? Email me: mafalda.gomes@exaud.com
Found this article helpful? Make sure you’re following us on social media to keep up with our blog posts!