Boost Team Productivity with Hatica's Async Standups

Standup meetings were once a uniquely agile team practice and then became a widely-adopted business-success practice because of their simplicity and efficiency. Teams across industries and throughout the world now use some form of a stand-up meeting to stay apprised of their team’s work progress, bottlenecks, and work activities using the 3-question format of the daily stand up. 

What are Async Stand-up Meetings?

Async stand-ups are a natural evolution of this meeting to accommodate distributed, remote, and hybrid teams. For co-located and distributed teams alike, the asynchronous stand up format has now become the preferred format of daily check-ins where team members provide their stand-up entries at a time and pace convenient to them. 

Why Does Your Team Need Async Stand-ups?

1. Take a step towards async work

The async standup is a step towards adopting async work. Asynchronous work does not  require two or more teammates to actively or synchronously participate in real-time to complete a task. In practice, this might look like teams where developers attend only the meetings where their presence and input is necessary or critical and all other communications or updates happen via Slack or communication tools, allowing developers to respond to communication requests when they are not involved in focus work. 

This allows teams to do is take control of their time and manage their schedules to allocate uninterrupted focus time, a.k.a., makers’ time that can enhance their performance, productivity, and well-being. 

2. Discuss what’s important

Async stand-ups also allow managers and leaders to fully assimilate the blockers or bottlenecks that their teams face. Using historical stand-up update notes and with enough time to find solutions to blockers, teams can spend more time discussing effective solutions to blockers rather than discussing what activities each team member was involved in. 

3. Be mindful of people’s time zones

Given that dev teams usually span more than one time zone, sometimes spanning across several time zones, the async stand-up is a considerate communication format that respects team members’ availability and time of day.

Async Stand-Ups with Hatica Check-Ins

The use of modern tools hugely benefits Async standups. At Hatica, we built our check-in feature to not just gather daily stand-up reports but to function as an entire framework of async operations that provides visibility and insights into daily activities, team members’ mood and pulse, developers’ satisfaction, and more. With powerful and automated dashboards and reports, async stand-ups with Hatica have the potential to transform how your team checks-in.

Take a look-

1. Standups as micro check-ins

Use Hatica to check-in regarding the status of tasks for your team members. 

We’ve used the well-tested and popular 3-question format as default check-in, where the tool asks team members to fill in details about what they did yesterday, what they plan on doing today, and what blockers they’re facing.

Hatica check-ins integrate seamlessly into your daily work day.

Get your check-in and reports delivered to where you work: in Slack, or Microsoft teams,  or in your Email. 

Make check-ins work for you. 

The feature is fully configurable to suit and adapt to your workflow. 

• Set the schedule to when you want your teams to check-in

• Configure the questions you want to ask

• Exclude people who are on leave, and

• Send the stand-ups based on the local time of your team members when your teams are distributed across different time zones

2. Improve visibility with data-driven insights 

Dev teams’ check-ins can be made more meaningful and impact-driven when qualitative stand-up reports are supported by work items from apps and tools. Hatica helps teams to automatically attach their work items to their check-ins. Hatica’s processes improves efficiency using integrations with your team’s tool stack which helps avoid redundancies and the extra work of spending time to attach and mention work items. 

Dev teams are reporting improved efficiency by using work activity attachments such as 

• Epics resolved in jira

• Pull requests merged

• App releases and service deployments

• Time spent interviewing candidates and other meetings

• Incidents resolved in pagerduty

For dev team managers and leaders, staying in the loop of their team’s work activities is critical to ensuring that they are able to provide inputs where necessary and allow creativity to flourish. 

Hatica complements check-in reports with work aggregate views. With insights from team Activity logs, managers can get an overview of their team’s work activity, tasks, and contributions. It also provides an opportunity for early intervention when bottlenecks emerge. 

3. Automated reports 

Work can be made more efficient when tools integrate seamlessly and provide a user-centric experience. That’s why Hatica’s reports are automatically delivered to your team where they already spend time, be it your Slack channels, emails, or any other channel of your preference. 

See reports on 

• Submission stats,

• Mood of your team,

• Blockers, and

• People who are on leave, to stay on top of team activity and buzz.

Alongside reports, use the Stand-ups dashboard to view all individual updates in a single dashboard that can help surface blockers. With high-level and detailed visibility into blockers, engineering managers can provide help and assistance to team members to pre-empt risks and bottlenecks and help teams stay on delivery schedules.

What’s next?

Tech innovations, process improvements, a pandemic, policies, and a myriad of ideas have turned work into a people-oriented, productivity-focused, and a sustainable, future-ready phenomenon. At Hatica, we’re taking stock of this future of work; We’re absorbing and fully breathing in the whirlwind of change that the workplace is going through. We’re also contributing and adapting to this evolving, bettering future of work - We’re building and adopting tools, dashboards, and workflows that help us and others build sustainable and successful teams. In this regard, our Check-Ins feature to facilitate async standups is our newest superstar. We invite you to try Check-ins, for free→