If you’re trying to set up a daily standup reminder in Slack, one option is to use Slack’s Workflow Builder. It’s pretty simple but limited, as we soon discuss.
Here’s how to set up a daily standup reminder in Slack:
- Click on your workspace name in the top left of your Slack account.
- Select Tools from the menu.
- Pick Workflow Builder.
- Click on the Template Tab.
- Click on Daily stand-ups & check-ins.
Then, you’d set up your standup and schedule it.
But there are two big drawbacks to this method:
- Slack’s Workflow Builder is not available on Slack’s free plan. So if you’re currently using the free plan, you’ll need to upgrade your entire account to set up a daily Slack standup reminder.
- You’re limited in how much you can customize your standup. Standups are handled differently from team to team, including what questions you ask, how often the standup is held, and when the standup is held. While you can customize aspects of your standup using Slack’s Workflow Builder, customization isn’t its strong suit.
Below, we look at a Geekbot — a free Slack standup bot that gives you the tools you need to fully customize your standups. Geekbot is completely free for teams of 10 or fewer participants (and if you’re a larger team, pricing is as low as $2.5 per user per month). Plus, Geekbot comes with a long list of extra features that help you get the most benefits from your standup.
Here are just a few of Geekbot’s features.
- The ability to factor in different timezones (perfect for remote teams)
- An optional reminder to make sure your team fills out their standup questions on time
- Data-driven insights based on your team’s responses, including a team happiness graph.
- And more.
You can create a free account today, or keep reading below to see a step-by-step guide on using Geekbot to run daily standups in Slack.
How to Set Up a Daily Standup in Slack with Geekbot (for Free)
Geekbot is a free daily standup tool that integrates with your Slack account. Our customers also use Geekbot to run better sprint retrospectives, surveys/polls, and more.
But below we look at how you can use Geekbot to run a daily standup in Slack.
First, the daily standup questions get sent directly to your team. Your team will answer the standup questions when it’s convenient for them.
Their answers are shared in whatever Slack channel you chose for your standups. Here, everyone in the channel can see each other’s responses.
This lets your team quickly skim through everyone’s standup updates quickly and efficiently.
Per the below image, if they see an update that needs their attention, they can create a thread or reach out to the person directly to solve the blocker.
Customizing Your Daily Standup in Slack with Geekbot
With Geekbot, you can customize almost every aspect of your daily standup.
This includes:
- The questions you ask
- When you send out your standup
- Broadcast channel
- Reminders
- And so much more
Customizing Your Standup Questions
We wrote at length about the standard daily standup questions — including the overlooked benefits of each question.
But the main takeaway here is that you need to be able to customize your questions towards your team.
With Geekbot, you can add/remove any number of questions. For example, we recommend that teams consider adding this simple question — “How do you feel today?” — to their standups.
This helps you spot any warning signs of a dissatisfied team early on so you can pinpoint what could be causing the issue. Plus, when your team answers this question, their answers get recorded and mapped on a Team Happiness graph:
Customizing Your Standup Schedule
A daily standup doesn’t have to happen daily. One of our customers, GitHub’s Services Programs team, does their standup twice a week. Once on Mondays, once on Fridays. This schedule matches their sprints, which are often repetitive and don’t require daily updates to keep blockers from forming.
Whatever your preferred daily standup schedule, you can use Geekbot to fulfill it.
You can pick the dates your standup questions will go out and the frequency.
For example, you can schedule your standup to go out:
- Daily
- Weekly
- 2-week period
- 3-week period
- 4-week period
- First week of each month
- Last week of each month
- And so on (these are just a few examples)
And you can also tell Geekbot to factor in a user’s local timezone.
The benefit is that you’ll have your standup go out at the right time for your entire team. If you have developers in LA and developers in London, they’ll both get their daily standup notification at the beginning of their day, instead of your London team getting it at the end of their day (when it’d make less sense to fill out the standup questions).
This feature is a big win for remote teams with distributed workers across the globe, and it has been mentioned often in our third-party reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra.
Plus, You Can Set Up Personal Reminders (Optional)
Let’s say a developer gets a ping from Slack that it’s time to fill out their daily standup, but they’re about to get on a last-minute scheduled Zoom call to solve some landing page issues. Instead of having to reschedule their Zoom call, Geekbot can automatically follow up with them later in the day.
That way they can focus on what’s most pertinent at the moment, and you don’t need to worry about developers getting so busy that they forget to follow up with Geekbot and fill out their standup questions.
Get Valuable Insights into Your Team (and Gamify the Standup Process) with Geekbot’s Analytics Dashboard
When you use Geekbot (even if you’re on our free plan), you get access to an analytics dashboard, that tells you key information like:
- Participation rate
- Report streak
- Who is currently out of the office
- Which daily standup report is getting the most attention
- And more.
There’s a lot of good you can do with the info shared in your analytics dashboard. One common strategy is to use this information to “gamify” your daily standup.
For example, you can run a contest that goes as long as your sprint — whoever has a perfect participation rate in the daily standup gets a reward.
If you’re ready to start using Geekbot to run highly customizable daily standups in Slack, click here.
For more information on the benefits of holding your standups (and other meetings) in Geekbot, check out these articles:
- Everything you need to know about daily standup meetings
- Agile project management: tips for releasing a great product every week
- Why we built software to run asynchronous standup meetings
- 12 best Scrum tools for project management (including tools like Jira, Geekbot, and nTask)
- How to overcome the challenges and embrace the benefits of remote work
- 7 Standuply alternatives for running standups and status updates in Slack
- 30 Slack Bots to help boost your team’s productivity
- 7 fun standup meeting ideas to keep team members focused
- 6 best Slack apps for meetings
- How to build teamwork and stability in a remote workforce
- 9 Slack reminder bots to always stay on top of your work