5 Free Daily Standup Meeting Tools to Check Team Status and Updates
The daily standup meeting has been widely adopted among remote and in-person teams. Whether you already use it or are thinking of adopting it, these free standup meeting apps enable a quick check on the status of all your team members.
The standup meeting is a must-have feature of agile and scrum frameworks for teams or individuals. The idea is to have a short meeting where each team member updates others about their achievements yesterday, their objectives today, and any obstacles they might face towards those objectives. If run efficiently, the daily standup meeting should take no more than one minute per person attending. And that type of efficiency and ease are what these standup meeting tools will ensure.
1.Spinach(Web): Daily Standup Meeting Video Calls, Live or Async
Spinach focuses on making daily standup meetings as quick and well-organized as possible. It’s free for teams of up to nine people and has a simple setup that integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, and Jira.
Before the start of the meeting, Spinach will send a daily reminder on Slack through the Spinach bot to prep for your updates by replying to the bot. You can also get these updates through Spinach using a different messaging app. The questions are already set by the team leader. Once everyone is ready, you can begin the live team video call orrun an asynchronous standup video call meeting.
Spinach rotates through the questions and updates for all members systematically. There’s also a timer to keep anyone from taking too many minutes. This organization is needed to ensure standup meetings don’t go off track.
The app encourages users not to go into discussions during the standup meeting and save those follow-ups by adding them to “Team Topics” during the meeting. Then, once the meeting is done, team members can choose to address those topics or let only concerned members handle it between themselves.
After meetings, Spinach sends a meeting summary through the Slack bot. You can also log into the Spinach app instead to see these summaries and previous history.
2.Undiffer(Web): Best Daily Standup Meeting Teams for Async Check-Ins
Undiffer is the best tool to run a classic daily standup meeting asynchronously. That means a common set of daily questions are posed to team members, who can update them at their convenience. It’s especially effective for remote teams where colleagues work in different time zones, but it’s possible to also use it in a regular office just to keep everyone on track.
The app offers four daily questions what did you accomplish yesterday, what are you working on today, is there anything blocking your progress, and your current mood (on a scale of smiley emojis). Everything you write as a response appears as a checklist item. you may keep checking those boxes as you accomplish tasks, which will appear automatically the next day in your “what did you accomplish yesterday” list.
Managers or members who want to check on other teammates can get instant insights. The dashboard, for instance, shows the team’s mood today and how many members have checked in. you may also see advanced statistics over different periods, like how many goals and blockers were added, how many were achieved, and the team’s overall mood.
All the data is easy to browse and peruse, as is updating the daily standup. Turning it into a checklist is also a nice idea for your team to use as a to-do list for the day and gives them a sense of accomplishment when they tick tasks as completed.
3.Armadill(Web): Kanban Board Meets Daily Standup Meetings
Often, productivity experts make youchoose between kanban and scrumas management systems. Armadill takes a slightly different approach, using the best features of the kanban board and the simplicity of daily standup meetings to create a hybrid.
There are only three boards in Armadill: Backlog, Today, and Done. You add cards into each to update your team about your status for the day, much like you would in a daily standup meeting. When you’ve filled out your cards, click the “Report Goals” button to add it to the team’s daily feed.
The whole team can see what everyone added to their three boards. in this daily feed. When anyone drag-and-drops a card from one board to another and clicks the report button, it’ll sync in the feed. It’s similar to running a daily standup meeting asynchronously but without the actual “meeting” part.
4.Geekbot(Chat Bot): Daily Standup Meetings in Slack and Microsoft Teams
For teams that use a chat app like Slack or Microsoft Teams, Geekbot is the perfect solution to get everyone to participate in a daily standup meeting. It’s free for teams of up to 10 users, and there are tiered pricing options.
Every day, Geekbot asks all users the usual set of standup questions: what they accomplished, objectives for today, obstacles they might face, and their current mood. Participants can type the responses within Slack and use emojis and mention users or channels to get alerts.
The responses are then updated in the #status channel. Here, team members can see what others are up to and have further discussions if needed. The status channel also shows other insights, like the team’s mood for today.
you may also ask Geekbot questions to check statuses quickly. For example, writing “What is X working on this week” will show you all of X’s unfinished objectives in a quick summary.
Geekbot can be used for other purposes too, like retrospectives, surveys, and 1-on-1s. If you want a more powerful but paid option, check out our review ofStanduply for Slack and MS Teams.
5.Team Snippets(Web): Best App for Daily Standup Meetings via Email
Some teams prefer to communicate via email rather than involve a lot of apps, video calls, and messaging. We saw quite a few free email templates for daily standup meetings and other resources, but we recommend paying $2 per user to use Team Snippets.
It’s a perfect implementation of the daily standup meeting to be used entirely in your inbox. You’ll get the standard three questions daily, with a dialog box to fill out answers. Separate your points by using a hyphen to start the line so that they appear as bullet points in the final summary. The summary is simple, to the point, and lets you reply to individual members by “commenting” on their snippet.
Administrators can set the email’s frequency, timing, and custom questions for the daily standup meeting. Team Snippets places a value on privacy, as it transfers data via secure connections and does not sell it to third parties.
Keep Standups to Status, Not Discussions
Whether you use a tool or hold meetings in person with your team members, there are two successful strategies to keep daily standup meetings from veering off track. The first is to set a timer for all participants to issue their update, usually about a minute. You might want to try the excellent and freeDaily Toasttool to set a one-minute timer for each participant in a standup meeting.
The second is not to entertain discussions. This can happen more often in the “obstacles and blockades” part, where team members can feel attacked or blamed. But the person running the meeting has to set a strict rule that the standup meeting is only for status updates. Any discussion about those updates will be done after the meeting between the relevant parties to avoid wasting anyone else’s time.
How do you make meetings more efficient instead of a big waste of time? These websites and apps can help.
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