As we’ve written about at length, running daily huddles in Slack comes with several benefits:
- Minimal workflow disruption
- An easier way to schedule your meetings
- Meetings that are quick to complete
Geekbot (our Slack standup bot) is free for teams of 10 or fewer active users. For larger teams, Geekbot is $2.50 per user per month (on an annual plan) and $3.00 per user per month (on a monthly plan).
We’re thankful that over 150,000 users have tried Geekbot, including teams within GitHub (see case study), GitLab (see case study), Zapier (see case study), Shopify (see case study), and more.
In this article, we’ll break down exactly how Geekbot works, including the various settings you can customize.
How to Run Daily Huddle Meetings in Slack with Geekbot
When it’s time for your daily huddle, Geekbot sends out a direct message to each participant, asking them to answer the daily huddle questions. (You can customize both when your daily huddles happen, and also which questions you ask, which we cover in more detail later in this article.)
Everyone answers the questions when it’s convenient for them. That’s one of the major benefits of holding asynchronous huddles.
Once someone has completed the daily huddle questions, their answers are shared in a Slack channel. (Most teams create a dedicated #huddle channel for easier organization.)
Here, the rest of the team can quickly read through everyone’s responses. If they see an update that warrants their attention, they can respond to it by creating a message thread. This way everyone can get the help they need, without notifying and disrupting other team members.
And just like that, you’ve completed your Slack huddle.
How to Set Up Your Huddle Meeting in Geekbot
With Geekbot, you can quickly set up and customize your huddle meeting, including editing the questions you ask and when you ask them.
If you’re more of a visual learner, you can watch this quick 5-minute video. Otherwise, keep reading.
First, add Geekbot to your Slackworkspace. Again, Geekbot is completely free for teams of 10 or fewer active users. For larger teams, Geekbot is $2.50 per user per month (on an annual plan) and $3.00 per user per month (on a monthly plan).
After you’ve added Geebot to your workspace, you can start customizing your first huddle meeting.
Choose Your Template and Questions
Geekbot has a number of different templates, ranging from daily huddles to retrospectives, well-being check-ins, and more.
If you select the daily huddle template, Geekbot defaults to the standard 3 daily huddles questions, plus an additional one: “How do you feel today?”. (To explore the benefits of asking questions like these, read our GitLab case study on increasing team camaraderie remotely).
You can also add new questions, delete any of the default questions, and select the way participants can respond:
For example, you can set it up so participants can respond with:
- A plain text response — Letting teammates respond via written text.
- A numeric response — Letting teammates respond with numbers only. This is great for when you want to easily quantify your team’s responses. For example: “On a scale of 1 to 5, how productive was last week for you?”
- A pre-defined response — Teammates would select the answer from a list of pre-defined responses. (This is similar to the multiple choice concept.)
Scheduling Your Huddle
You can easily schedule your huddle to fit your team’s needs. For example, some teams will want to hold a daily huddle. This could be because they have fast-paced sprints that are subject to significant changes from day to day. In that case, you can schedule your daily huddle to go out every morning, Monday through Friday, and to recur on a weekly basis.
On the other hand, as we outlined in this case study, GitHub’s Services Programs team worked on projects that didn’t change significantly day to day. So with Geekbot, they scheduled their standup to happen twice a week: once at the beginning of the week, and once at the end.
Taking Local Timezone into Account
You can also configure Geekbot to send out meeting notifications based on a user’s local timezone.
This way, it doesn’t matter if someone is in Greece or Tokyo or Chicago — they’ll all get the notification that it’s time for the daily huddle at a convenient time of the day (e.g., 9:00 A.M. rather than midnight).
Learn More about Geekbot
This is just the tip of the iceberg. For more information, visit our site and view our product tour.
Geekbot is free for teams of 10 or fewer active users. For larger teams, Geekbot is $2.50 per user per month (on an annual plan) and $3.00 per user per month (on a monthly plan).
Create a free Geekbot account today.
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