Improve your Daily Huddles with Mevisio

Daily huddles are a quick and effective way to increase efficiency in your business and ensure that everyone knows what they need to do to achieve company goals.

What is a Daily Huddle?

A daily huddle is a short, recurring once-a-day meeting, held around a visual management board that is used to keep the team up-to-date on the business and visually lay out what needs to get done. Huddles should be kept short in an effort to avoid taking too much valuable time away from the business - 15 minutes is usually the sweet spot.

15 minutes may not seem like enough time to get anything done, but trust us, 15 minutes is all you need to take your work to the next level. In just 15 minutes, you can address essential items on your agenda and keep the team abreast of the latest news. Additionally, by including a few minutes for feedback every day, your team will stay on the ball and you’ll be able to quickly identify obstacles at an early stage, giving you the chance to nip them in the bud right away.

Different Types of Daily Huddles

Daily huddles come in many different shapes and sizes, but they should all be around 15 minutes with everyone standing around the board:

• For information huddles, everyone in the huddle takes turns presenting what they are currently working on in their specific role, with some questions and answers sprinkled throughout. That way, everyone has the same information and a clear picture of where things stand in the company.
• Coordination huddles are similar to information huddles, but with one clear difference: the purpose is to share the information that everyone in the huddle needs to perform their job efficiently. This format doesn’t require any one person to run the whole thing, but it’s still a good idea to at least have an agenda prepared in advance.
• Dialogue huddles are when you really want to dig in and talk specifics, where each person speaks and listens in equal amounts. These huddles are for discussing the WHATs and WHYs behind what needs to get done. Dialogues engage people. You naturally feel more confident about an issue when you feel like others have listened to what you have to say and your opinions have been discussed and validated.

How Mevisio Streamlines your Daily Huddles

At Mevisio, we’re big fans of daily huddles, and we know exactly what features a board needs to ensure your huddles are as streamlined as possible. That’s why our visual management boards come with a daily huddle module. The module includes clearly visualized KPIs along with information, checklists, employee availability, and features for managing and escalating issues and ideas. Need another feature? We’ve got you covered. All of our boards are fully customizable to your needs. Read more about our boards here.

Three Tips for Effective Daily Huddles

• Encourage everyone to actively participate in huddles. Turn huddles into a daily ritual that employees look forward to. 
• Keep huddles easy and surface-level. Break the ice by sharing some good news or something else positive. This is a great way to get the conversation going.
• Write the topics that are brought up throughout the huddle on the board. Even though huddles are short, it’s still a good idea to note everything that is discussed. Certain topics might need to be revisited at a later date. 

Three Things to Avoid 

• Don’t go too in depth with anything that only pertains to a specific employee. Doing so can quickly lead to that employee feeling uncomfortable, and maybe even victimized, so it’s better to save the questions for a one-on-one meeting. 
• Don’t cram too much into one huddle. Too much information means longer huddles, which takes valuable time away from the business. Save the bigger questions for a longer weekly meeting.