Working remotely is great for many reasons. Those used to leading in a traditional office setting, however, may find themselves at a disadvantage. What's the best way to on-board and connect to a bunch of people you may not even know in real life yet?

Team synchronization is one concept that's become very popular in light of the pandemic and the resulting work-from-home movement. Before, many remote teams were struggling to get by through daily Zoom meetings and asynchronous communication.

Thankfully, society has come a long way since then. Standuply is the Teams and Slack free stand-up bot integration covering the wide choice of features like planning poker, surveys, reminders, and more.

What Is a Daily Stand-Up?

A daily stand-up meeting, also known as a daily Scrum session or Scrum event, is your way of checking in with your team in order to remain up-to-date on their needs and accomplishments.

It's more than a daily or weekly meeting; the culture of Scrum and Agile goes deep, but you don't necessarily need to immerse yourself completely in order to benefit from what this philosophy has to offer you, your team, and the work that you do together.

At its core, a successful stand-up meeting has a few base-level goals: you, the Scrum Master, lead a team. They have different goals, often in the form of actual sprints. Their goals relate to your goals; therefore, their success is your success.

The purpose of a Scrum meeting is to give all parties involved a chance to align themselves with one or more "north star" goals. You achieve alignment by informing your team through a frank and transparent system of communication, feedback, and complete transparency. Through this insight and through your assistance as a manager, they become more equipped to tackle the work ahead than they would be on their own.

Atlassian describes a daily stand-up Scrum session as your team's "huddle" before diving into the day or the week. It gives everybody that you manage a chance to report on what's happening, what's been done, and what's ahead, as well as any insurmountable challenges that they're running into.

How to Do a Daily Stand-Up: What Makes a Daily Stand-Up Productive and Useful?

Stand-up Scrum meetings are results-focused and mission-driven by definition.

If you're somebody who thinks meetings are often a waste of time, we're right there with you. The value of a regular stand-up, however, cannot be denied if the productivity of your team as it relates to your actual goals as an organization are a priority to you in any way:

• A daily or weekly stand-up clears the air immediately, addressing issues that may otherwise end up being lost in endless email chains back and forth
• Your team will feel connected, united, and totally on the same page about everything that they need to do together
• Frequent status reports ensure that you never find yourself in the dark when your team's plans go awry
• Your team's focus and list of priorities will be updated with more agility and as needed when you have an opportunity to reconvene with them regularly
• You give your team direct access to you as a source of support through a daily stand-up, which means that you'll know exactly what's going on at any given time—roadblocks are reported sooner, for instance, giving you more time to clear the way for progress
• Sharing success is a proven morale booster—why not give them a reason to celebrate your collective wins daily or weekly?

All in all, stand-ups do a really great job of precluding the need for random, pointless, and time-wasting meetings throughout the week by answering important questions and making important connections on a regular and anticipated basis. Small hiccups can be collected and compiled, and you'll be able to solve everybody's problems at once. The show goes on uninterrupted.

Consider stand-ups to be daily or weekly investments of your valuable time. Well-informed employees tend to work better autonomously; with the right amount of insight and face-time, you might find that they're able to get way more done in their time away than they were able to previously.

The Benefits of Automating Your Daily Stand-Up Meeting

Slack and MS Teams stand-up bot integrations for team-building software are one great way to manage your daily stand-up without worrying about anything falling through the cracks. You may have heard of solutions like Standuply, Geekbot, Polly, Kyber, and many, many stand-up implementations available through hubs like the Atlassian Marketplace, Slack app directory or Office 365 store.

Most of these options offer your team more than a few strategic advantages:

• You can customize your team's schedule and the collaborative resources that they have access to with ease, tailoring the system to your needs

• The focus of the exercise will shift more toward progress, project knowledge, and clearing the way, as opposed to the logistics of conducting a remote meeting
• You'll no longer find yourself wasting valuable time doing things the old-fashioned way, manually scheduling and managing every stand-up and invite through Google Calendar or another calendar app

The good news is that you don't need to be an enterprise insider in order to benefit from a full-throttle, automated stand-up integration. Standuply is one all-inclusive tool that you can use to improve your team's workflow through a daily or weekly stand-up. Getting started is really easy, no credit card info required.

How to Use Standuply With Slack

To use Standuply, sign up for an account—you'll be ushered directly to your own personal stand-up dashboard, a 30-day free trial in order to ascertain whether or not the platform is right for you.

After breaking in, you'll be able to either integrate Standuply bot with Slack directly or by way of an authorization link that you can send to the admin of your Slack workspace.

Standuply Key Features: One of the Best Stand-Up Bots on the Block

You can read the full disclosure on Standuply on the brand's site, and you can even request a full-on product demo after signing up. For a quick run-down, however, there's plenty to read on the Standuply blog.

When you choose Standuply for Slack, you can expect all of the following automated features, and much more:

• Stand-ups, retrospectives, one-on-ones, and feedback implementations
• Employee onboarding
• Scrum poker features, also known as planning poker
• Backlog grooming and reports history
• Extensive analytics
• Role-based access and permissions, as well as all of your personally-managed enterprise accounts on one single dashboard
• OKRs and Agile chart calculus (burn-down, velocity, and sprint defects)
• Compatibility with Trello, Jira, Asana, Github, Hubspot, Pivotal, and more
• Support for up to 30 unique reports
• Text, voice, video, and even image-, task-, and file-based communication
• A highly-customizable interface and experience, including their own Internal Q&A system
• SOC2 and ISO compliance
• Customer support (chat, demo, calls on request) with your own dedicated account manager

Standuply is the team-building service and the best standup solution for over 100,000 companies, including IBM, Google, and even Slack itself. After five minutes of exploring the service, it won't be difficult to see why.

Remote Collaboration With Standuply

If you're wondering what async collaboration looks like within the Standuply universe, the image above is one great place to start. This Slack bot integration goes way beyond your daily Slack stand-up, although it's got you fully covered in that regard.

Aside from the basics, you'll also find:

• OKR planning provides the perfect glimpse into your forecast for the upcoming quarter ahead
• Dedicated stand-up subtypes pertinent to things like Sprint planning, Helpdesk tickets, Team Goals, Retrospective Reports, Mood Reports, and Lessons learned
• Planning poker, One-on-Ones, Feedback on Finished Tasks and Surveys on Current Tasks all keep your team connected and in-tune with one another
• Remote Employee onboarding is one area where Standuply shines in particular; it's a life-saver when training remotely during this pivotal preliminary period of time
• You can even plan a lunch date with your team using the Lunch train report option, diplomatically choose the toppings on your Friday pizza, and share A fun fact of the week with your crew

We love Standuply because it's got deep roots in the world of Agile project management. Contrary to popular belief, this extremely collaborative, hands-on way of working remotely translates well to a number of other industries, however.

Anybody managing a team of cohorts will be able to benefit from this way of working and thinking, even if you're not working in tech or development outright. Standuply is built for collaboration, whether you're working with customers, clients, content, or code.

Standuply: Effortless Remote Collaboration for Teams That Care

Standuply is perfect for new leaders, and even experienced leaders still getting their sea legs in our new world of remote async communication. Collaboration software like Standuply brings the entire world closer together; no matter how far you are from your people, you can guarantee that you won't ever be out of touch.