Our team chat went quiet after I let go of the morning standup

I run a 7-person creative agency in Portland and I thought ditching the daily 10 AM standup would free up time. It's been 3 weeks now and I've noticed two projects got duplicate work done because nobody knew who was doing what. Yesterday my lead designer admitted she's been working on a concept my copywriter already finished 4 days ago. Has anyone else tried dropping a ritual like this and regretted it?

2 comments

2 Comments

jackson.wesley24d ago

I feel you on this one. I've seen teams totally fall apart when they drop the morning check in. Those 15 minutes where everyone just says what theyre working on is super annoying but it catches so many of these headaches before they happen. It sounds like your people are good at their jobs, they just lost the main way they stayed in sync with each other. Have you thought about trying a shorter version, like a 10 minute standup where people literally say three things and done? Sometimes a little structure keeps the wheels from falling off without feeling like a waste of time.

taylor_moore23d ago

Wait, hold on. You're saying they just dropped the morning check in cold turkey with no backup plan? That's wild to me. Like, I get that standups can feel like a drag sometimes (believe me, I've been in ones that dragged on for 45 minutes and wanted to scream), but just killing it without replacing it with something is asking for trouble. I've seen teams try to be "more efficient" by getting rid of sync time and they end up spending way more hours putting out fires later because nobody knew what anyone else was working on. It's like they thought being good at their jobs meant they could read each other's minds, which never works out. Honestly, I'm more surprised they managed to stay afloat for a whole month before things started falling apart.