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The daily huddle is the heartbeat of the Great Game of Business®. It’s part of most any game - a quick, efficient team meeting where you adjust your game plan and then get back in the game and play.
But are all staff huddles the same? No!
We find you can customize your huddle technique based on the:
- Type of business – a law firm huddle may differ from a machine shop huddle
- Type of work – a software team huddle may differ from the financial team’s huddle
- Culture – some are fun, loud, calm, quick, loose, tight – it just depends on what motivates, works, and fits your team
- Environment – the way you huddle in a library may differ from how you do it on a loud machine shop floor or with a virtual team on a webcast
Hybrid Huddles
At HingePoint we created our own huddle that’s 3 parts rolled into one:
- Great Game of Business
- Lean – from2 Second Lean Book and Lean expert Paul Akers
- Agile – the software scrum methods
For your reference, here’s our HingePoint Huddle Agenda. You’re welcome to borrow from ours!
We conduct our huddle via webcast, the same time every day from 8:30 am – 9:00 am.
Agenda:
8:00 – 3S – Sweep, Sort, Clean – work area, bathroom
8:25 – Leader starts call/Chime
8:30 – Good Morning HingePoint!
8:31 – Announce Tomorrows Leader
8:32 – Sales Numbers/Activities
8:34 – Huddle – Team 30 Second Daily Priority (each person says what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and any roadblocks they are facing)
8:39 – Mistakes Discussion – How to Improve – 2 Second improvements
8:55 – Values – Performance, Positive, Partners
8:56 – Learn to See Lean – 8 Sources of Waste: Over Production, Over Processing, Excess Inventory, Defects, Transportation, Wasted Motion, Waiting Time, Not Using Employee Genius.
8:59 – Back to Work
Here’s What We Use From:
Great Game of Business (GGOB)- We borrowed the getting together, reviewing the numbers people prepared, issues, mistakes, and how to fix it. Our daily huddles do role up to a weekly 1.5 hour “Huddle” with everyone, and we review the week's scorecards and discuss any numbers that are off forecast.
Lean- We borrowed the 30-minute warm-up where you sweep, sort, and clean your work area to get organized and ready to maximize your productivity. Sales numbers are also from Lean because sales drive activity across the company. The mistakes discussion is a tenant of Lean: to stay humble, honest, admit when you make mistakes, and being empowered to fix it and make the company better. This helps everyone grow and lead in their area.
Agile- We borrowed the short format. In Agile, scrums are supposed to be only 15 minutes! They don’t like meetings in Agile. It’s a self-organizing team approach where everyone works together, and everyone works on the same “sprint” or bundle of code they are developing (typically in 2 or 4-week sprints). The daily huddle keeps things on track. Also from Agile, we borrowed:
- What did you complete yesterday? Accountability for what you said you’d do yesterday.
- What do you plan to complete today? Commit in public to your share of the team load.
- What roadblocks are preventing your progress? These are meant for the Scrum Master to take back to management and help clear the roadblock, so progress can continue.
Agile is really a “do as you say” approach, and at the end of a sprint, the teams all evaluate each other’s performance and can even kick out a weak member! Ouch. We don’t have that issue at HingePoint, but we do weed out players that can’t hit their weekly scorecard goals associated with their forecast and job description.
The huddle is a great and efficient way to keep the team aligned daily. Hold the huddle consistently, never changing it, and you might find it is something you look forward to in the morning. It’s like catching up on all the action like reading the sports page!
HingePoint is excited to sponsor the world’s largest conference on open-book management, which brings together Great Game practitioners and “tire kickers” from around the world to share best practices and lessons from the field related to engaging employees at all levels of the company in all aspects of the business.
The 27th Annual Gathering of Games will take place September 4-6, 2019, in Dallas, TX and we hope to see you there! If you are planning on attending, we’d love to hear from you ahead of time! Contact us so we can set up a time to chat!
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