Why most standups deserve their bad reputation
Ask a store team about daily standups and you will usually get a grimace. That reaction is earned. The standup most people have sat through is a round-robin where each person narrates what they did yesterday to a manager, while everyone else waits for their turn and thinks about something else.
That meeting has a purpose, but the purpose is reporting, and reporting to one person does not need six people in a room. If your standup is really a status update, cancel it and ask people to write two lines instead.
A standup worth keeping does something a written update cannot: it surfaces collisions and blockers while there is still time to act on them. That is the entire justification, and it is enough of one.
The three questions
Not the classic three. The classic set (what did you do, what will you do, what is blocking you) leads directly to status theatre, because two of the three questions are reports.
For a store team, these work better:
- What has to happen today that will not happen on its own? Not everything on your plate. The things that need a decision, a person, or a hand-off.
- Who needs something from someone else in this room? This is the collision question and it is the reason to be synchronous. It catches the case where two people are both waiting on each other and neither knew.
- What is different about today? A promotion starting, a courier collection moved, someone leaving early, a supplier delivery. Anything that makes today not look like yesterday.
Notice that none of them ask what you did yesterday. Yesterday is only relevant if it is blocking today, and question one catches that.
Keeping it to ten minutes
Time limits fail when they are aspirations. These are the mechanics that make one hold.
Stand up, or set a visible timer
The name is not decorative. Standing works because it gets uncomfortable, which is the point. If you are remote or your team is on a floor where standing is meaningless, put a ten-minute timer where everyone can see it.
Park anything that needs discussion
The single biggest cause of overrun. Someone raises a real issue, two people start solving it, and the other four stand there for eight minutes.
The fix is a phrase everyone is allowed to use: "park it." The issue gets a name, an owner and a time later that day. It does not get solved now. Anyone can call it, including the most junior person, and that permission has to be explicit or only the manager will use it.
Same time, attached to an event
Not a calendar time that slides. Right after the shop opens, or right after the first fulfilment run. Events are self-triggering and times are not, which is the same principle that makes a daily operations routine survive a busy week.
Cap the size
Ten minutes across eight people is seventy-five seconds each. Past about six people a standup either runs long or becomes a performance. If you are bigger than that, split it by function and have the leads talk separately.
The async version, for teams that never overlap
Plenty of store teams have no moment when everyone is present. Split shifts, part-timers, a warehouse in one place and a founder in another. A synchronous standup is not available and pretending otherwise just excludes people.
Async works if you keep the same three questions and add one rule: post before you start, not when you remember. A standup note written at 4pm is a diary entry.
Format that works, three lines, in a dedicated room so it is not buried in general chat:
- Today: the two or three things that need to happen.
- Need: anything you need from a named person, or "nothing".
- Heads up: what is different today, or blank.
The "Need" line is doing the real work. It is the async replacement for the collision question, and it only works if people name a person rather than writing "need the stock figures", which is addressed to nobody.
One person should read the whole thread each morning and act on anything unclaimed. Without that, async standups become a wall of notes nobody reads, which is worse than no standup because it feels like communication.
What to do with what comes up
A standup that surfaces problems and does not track them trains people to stop raising things. Whatever comes out of the ten minutes needs to land somewhere with a name attached before people disperse.
In practice that means anything parked or claimed becomes a task with an owner and a time, created in the moment rather than remembered afterwards. If the tool makes that a single step from the conversation, it happens. If it means opening a second application and re-typing context, it does not, and the standup slowly becomes theatre again by a different route.
The test of a standup is not whether it happened. It is whether anything is different at 11am because of it.
When to stop doing it
Standups are not permanent furniture. Cancel it when:
- Nothing has been parked in a month. Either you have no collisions, which is good and means you do not need the meeting, or people have stopped raising them, which is bad and means the meeting is not safe.
- It is consistently under three minutes. Two people who sit together do not need a ritual to talk to each other.
- Attendance is drifting. People vote with their feet before they say anything. Treat drift as feedback rather than as a discipline problem.
Reintroducing it later is cheap. Keeping a meeting alive out of habit costs a few hours a month and, worse, teaches people that meetings are things you endure rather than things that help.
What good answers sound like
The questions only work if the answers are specific, and specificity has to be modelled before people produce it. Compare these.
Weak: "I'm carrying on with the returns backlog." That is a status report. Nobody can help, nothing can collide, and the next person is already thinking about their turn.
Strong: "I'm on the returns backlog, but I need Priya to confirm the two damaged jackets before I can close them out." Now there is a name, a dependency, and something that can be resolved in the next thirty seconds rather than sitting for a day.
Weak: "Nothing much, normal day." Almost always untrue, and usually means the person has not thought about it yet.
Strong: "Normal, except the courier collection moved to two o'clock, so anything not packed by half one goes tomorrow." That single sentence changes what four other people do this morning.
If your answers sound like the weak versions, the fix is not to lecture people about standup quality. Ask a sharper question. "What do you need from someone here?" produces better answers than "what are you working on?" because it cannot be answered with a status.
The one that quietly breaks it
Watch for the standup where the same person answers first every day and everyone else calibrates to their length and tone. It sounds like consistency and it is actually a ceiling: nobody will raise something messier or more uncertain than whatever the first speaker just modelled.
Rotate who starts. It costs nothing and it changes what gets said, because the person who goes first sets the level of candour for everyone after them.
Standups during peak season
The instinct in a busy period is to drop the standup, because ten minutes feels unaffordable. That is exactly backwards, and it is the most common self-inflicted wound of the season.
Peak is when collisions multiply. More people, more temporary staff, more things moving at once, and less slack to absorb a mistake. The ten minutes that felt optional in March is the cheapest coordination you will buy in November.
What should change is the content, not the existence. During peak, cut question one entirely, because everyone already knows what has to happen today. Keep the collision question and keep what is different, since those are the two that prevent duplicated work and missed changes.
If the team genuinely cannot gather, run it as three written lines. A degraded standup is worth considerably more than none, and the alternative is discovering at four o'clock that two people spent the morning on the same backlog.
Common questions
How long should a store team standup be?
Ten minutes is a good ceiling for up to six people. If it consistently runs longer, the cause is almost always discussion that should have been parked rather than too many people.
Should part-time staff attend?
Only on days they work, and only if the timing fits their shift. If a meaningful part of the team cannot attend, run it async instead of running it for the people who happen to be there.
Can standups work if we all work different hours?
Yes, in written form. Keep the same questions, require posting before the shift starts rather than at the end, and have one person read the thread each morning and pick up anything unclaimed.
Who should run it?
Whoever opens, rather than the most senior person. If the owner runs it every day it drifts into a status report delivered to them, which is the failure mode this format exists to avoid.
What if someone always overruns?
Give everyone explicit permission to say "park it", junior staff included. Overrun is usually a structural problem rather than a personality one, and a shared phrase fixes it faster than a quiet word.