What Questions Do I Ask In Friday Work Routines?

Friday is a work updates tool that can help you be productive during your work days. You can use Friday for your own personal progress, alongside a team for daily updates, or both.

Friday has many routine templates that you can connect to your planner which can help you create effective routines and habits at work. 

Here are a few different templates available and the questions you can ask to get the most out of it.

1. Morning Routine

The Morning Routine is here to help you plan your day in the morning. It can help you stay on track and manage your time.

Advantages: 

• Can explain your daily goals to accomplish
• Helps you hit your goals faster
• Routine Builder:
• Automate and kickstart work habits
• Create better process
• Create better routines
• Able to plan your day however you see fit
• direct acknowledgement of your productivity

Here are potential question prompts in the template for your Morning Routine:

1. How are you feeling?
2. Did you accomplish yesterday’s goals?
3. What are your must wins for today?
4. What’s on your mind right now?

Other potential questions to add to this template: 

1. How do you want to feel by the end of the day?
2. What can you do to succeed today?
3. What do you want to focus on today?
4. Is there something you want to improve?

We also have a Morning Gratitude template available within Friday that can help you reflect on what you’re grateful for.

2. Daily Standup

The Daily Standup is a template to keep up to date with your remote team. You are able to mention your daily updates and also see the updates of the people on your team.

Advantages:

• Effective way you communicate as a team asynchronously
• Spend this time getting up to date with what your team is doing
• You can see what tasks you fulfilled the day prior
• Indicator if synchronous meetings need to be held to resolve any roadblocks
• Avoid wasting time during meetings on updates to be more productive

Here are the question prompts in the template for your Daily Standup which are all open-ended:

1. What did you accomplish yesterday?
2. What are you working on today?
3. Any Blockers?
4. Anything else?

3. Weekly Updates

Weekly Updates is a template that allows you to keep up with your team’s weekly progress. Asynchronous communication is a beneficial way of sharing information that can replace a synchronous meeting. With this template you can showcase your progress, share wins you’ve achieved, and explore priorities for next week.

Advantages: 

• Be informed of what you and your team accomplished last week
• Eliminate/reduce status update meetings and focus more on collaboration meetings.
• See what you’d like to focus on during the week

Here are some question prompts in the template for your Weekly Updates:

1. How was your week?
2. What are your accomplishments for the week?
3. Do you have any priorities for next week?
4. Anything else you’d like to share?

Other potential questions to add to this template:

1. Were there any challenges you faced?
2. How are you feeling about your week?
3. Is there something you could do to improve this week?

Friday also has a team Weekly Check-In template available to use.  

4. Team Agenda

The Weekly Team Meeting Agenda template is here to help you formulate agendas so you’re prepared for your meetings. You can save time by connecting with other project management tools.

Advantages:

• Collect agenda before the meeting
• You can say whether you are on track, in progress, or stuck on your tasks
• You can go straight to the important information that you want to discuss
• Know exactly what you’re going to discuss during the meeting

Here are potential question prompts in the template you can ask:

1. What would you like to discuss in this meeting?
2. What is your current status? 
3. Anything else you'd like to share?

5. 1-1 Meetings

The 1-1 Meetings template is here to help jumpstart valuable conversations for meetings. With this you can keep 1-1 meetings efficient because you’ll be more prepared on what to discuss.

Advantages:

• It can be seen as: “foundation before the meeting happens”
• Prepare for 1-1 meetings through the use of this template.
• Can focus on specific/important info so you don’t waste time during meetings.
• Can address any positive progress you’re making
• Can bring forth any issues that should be resolved

Here are some Question Prompts for 1-1 Meetings in the template you could use:

1. How is everything going?
2. What’s going well?
3. Any challenges? Anything I can do to help?
4. Anything else we should discuss?

Here are a few other potential questions you can ask:

1. What are your priorities this week?
2. How do you feel about the way the company is progressing?
3. Do you have any feedback you’d like to share?

6. Skip Level Feedback

Skip Level Feedback is a template that can be used to help get a better understanding of how the company is doing across different teams. Skip Level meetings can build a connection throughout the organization and build trust. 

Advantages

• Improves team communication
• Collect valuable information to improve the company
• Build and maintain team relationship 

Here are potential question prompts for Skip Level Feedback.

1.  What is your team doing well on?
2. Is there anything your team is struggling with?
3. What do you think are your team’s strengths?
4. What do you think are your team’s weaknesses?
5. Do you have any suggestions for the company?

7.  Sprint Retrospectives

Sprint Retrospectives is a template where a team can take time to reflect on what went well during work as well as what can be improved upon. It can be beneficial to improving the productivity of the team when done weekly.

Advantages:

• Gather important information before the meeting takes place
• Improve the projects you do as a team through reflection

Here are some Sprint Retrospective question prompts you can use:

1. What went well?
2. What didn’t go so well?
3. What have you learned?
4. What still confuses you?
5. What were the biggest obstacles you’ve faced?

8. Daily Scrum

The Daily Scrum template is beneficial for team collaboration. By sharing what you’re working on, any challenges you faced, and what you've already accomplished, your team will be able to be more efficient in completing tasks.

Advantages:

• Enforces fast feedback loops
• Improves communication between the team

Here are some Daily Scrum question prompts you can ask:

1. What did you accomplish yesterday? 
2. What are your priorities for today? 
3. Do you have any challenges you are facing?
   

9. Progress, Plans, Problems

The Progress, Plans, and Problems template is here to help give out status updates.

Advantages:

• Know what different members of your team are working on
• Solve problems as a team and be more productive

Here are some Progress, Plans, and Problems question prompts in the template you can ask: 

1. What is being worked on?
2. What is up next?
3. What is impeding progress?

10. Start, Stop, Keep

Start, Stop, Keep is a template here to indicate what tasks you should start, tasks you should stop, and tasks you should continue to work on.

Advantages:

• Prioritize your tasks
• Streamline team feedback

Here are some Start, Stop, Keep question prompts in the template you can ask:

1. What should we start doing?
2. What should we stop doing?
3. What should we keep doing?

11. Icebreakers

Icebreakers are a fun way to connect with your team remotely. Even when your colleagues are spread around the world you can still maintain a strong connection through this template. 

Advantages: 

• Helps create an office feel even when working remotely
• Icebreaker questions to get to know your team unrelated to work

Here are some fun open ended question prompts in the template you can ask:

1. What is your favorite vacation spot?
2. What is your favorite emoji?
3. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?
4. What’s a funny story from your first job?

For more, go to our complete list of icebreaker questions.

Conclusion

These are a few templates that you can use and some of the suggested questions you can ask. You even have the option to customize your questions so that they best fit you and your team.

In terms of setting up question prompts, you have an array of question styles you can ask. You can ask an open ended question that allows for greater freedom in answering. If you want a more specific response you can choose from the other options which include: an emoji response, numeric response, sentiment response, direct yes or no answer, or likert where you say if you agree or disagree to the question.

What are the benefits of having these routines in Friday?

• Friday is here as a record so you can refer back to important tasks and information.
• Through the use of icebreaker questions you can connect with your team and build relationships.
• Through Daily Standups, Weekly Updates and other templates you can have a better sense of what people on your team are working on.
• You can organize your workflows and improve your productivity.