Question 1

What is the daily huddle?

Accepted Answer

A daily huddle is another name for a daily scrum, a popular routine in agile teams. In highly collaborative environments, a daily huddle can serve as a helpful way to share information, keep people accountable, and proactively identify potential roadblocks that impede progress. A daily huddle should be less than fifteen minutes. People should come prepared to a daily huddle ready to share what they are working on.

Question 2

How does this help me spend less time in meetings?

Accepted Answer

Most meetings (especially routine ones) begin with a status update before diving into collaboration. If you get your updates out of the way before you meet, you can instantly jump into more meaningful conversation. Ever felt like a meeting should have been an email? We understand.

Question 3

Why should the daily huddle happen every day?

Accepted Answer

The daily huddle should happen every day because it speeds up the flow of information. If a team is all working on the same project, it's critical that each person have ambient awareness of what others are working on. If you use Friday, you can pick from a variety of prompts (open-ended, emoji, sentiment, numeric, and more). These structured prompts make it easy for your team to respond. With that being said, Friday is completely customizable, so you can tailor it to your needs! Start for free.

Question 4

Should daily huddles be asynchronous?

Accepted Answer

We strongly recommend that the daily huddle should be asynchronous. At Friday, we think meetings are best for collaboration, not general information sharing. It can be incredibly difficult to coordinate schedules for a group (especially distributed teams). A fifteen minute meeting every day costs thousands of dollars per month, even for a small team! If you share updates and information outside of a meeting, you can dramatically accelerate better conversations in less time. Who knows, maybe you don't need to have the meeting at all?

Question 5

What are the best practices for daily huddles?

Accepted Answer

Daily huddles are effective work habits, but there are pitfalls you should avoid as well. For example: Limit the meeting to 15 minutes max Come to the meeting prepared Avoid 1-1 conversation until after the huddle is over Don't share a list of activities. Share work that is relevant to the rest of the group. Spend most of your time on blockers. Hold a huddle at the same time. Create consistency

Question 6

What questions should I ask in my daily huddle?

Accepted Answer

We recommend the following questions in your daily huddles: What did you accomplish yesterday? (open-ended) What do you aim to accomplish today? (open-ended) Any roadblocks? (open-ended) As you roll out this communication process, you can add and remove questions based on feedback from the team. If you use the Friday template, you can customize the questions (emojis, open-ended responses, true/false, and more).

Question 7

What are other best practices to the daily huddle?

Accepted Answer

There are a few best practices to make the most of this information sharing event at work. We've shared our top tips below: 1.) Use these reports to eliminate information sharing meetings - meetings are great for collaboration, not basic information sharing. If you use the Friday huddle template, you won't need to have a huddle in real-time which can save you thousands of dollars every month. 2.) Roll up responses at employee level - after a few weeks of updates, rollup the responses per employee and see exactly what someone's contributions were over the past few weeks. 3.) Document output, not the inputs - encourage the team to document output vs. activity in these updates. This is a major lesson we learned from the book, High Output Management. 4.) Keep it simple - Don't reinvent the wheel. The more questions you ask, the more likely someone is to not complete the update. Limit the huddle to three questions (max) 5.) Map work to a higher-level goal - how did the day-to-day work contribute to a higher-level purpose, goal, or company strategy? Make sure to document why you are working on a particular task. 6.) Link to the work in 3rd party tools - if you use project management tools, make sure to link to the appropriate activity if someone wants to learn a bit more. We make this easy with our integrations.

Question 8

How does Friday integrate with Slack/Teams?

Accepted Answer

When it's time to share an update, we'll send a DM to the participants. When people share an update, you can push responses into a channel or room for visibility. You can see how this works here.

Question 9

How does this integrate with project management tools?

Accepted Answer

When it's time to share an update, we can pull in the tasks from other tools, including Asana, Trello, ClickUp, Todoist, and more. This makes it much easier to share updates...because your work is right in front of you!  Friday is constantly adding integrations. Here's the current list: Calendar apps: Google Calendar Outlook Task management apps: Todoist Microsoft To Do Clickup (tasks) Asana (tasks) Trello Feel free to drop us a note if you'd like us to add another app!

Question 10

How does this integrate with the Friday planner?

Accepted Answer

The planner is your personal space for roadmapping your day. With that being said, when it's time to share an update, we'll show your work and make it easy to copy over items with one click.

Question 11

Who can see daily huddle responses in Friday?

Accepted Answer

It's up to you! We let you choose who can see the responses. For example, you could select one of the following options: Just You (we don't recommend this option for a daily huddle). Everyone on the Team (the best option) External stakeholders

Question 12

How much does Friday cost?

Accepted Answer

At Friday, we have a free plan with no trial restrictions that you can signup for here. This should give you a great idea of how things work. We have a premium tier that starts at $6/mo per person. The good news is that if you use Friday, you will dramatically decrease the amount of time you spend in regular update meetings, which gives your team more time for deep work.

Async Meeting Routines

Run your daily huddle in half the time

Reduce Your Number of Meetings

Pick questions and prompts for your daily huddle

Set a daily meeting cadence

Notifications are sent automatically in workplace chat.

Share an update for the daily huddle

See instant, automatic reports

Push meeting updates into Slack & Teams

Rinse, repeat, and customize

Daily Huddle FAQs