This YouTube presentation gives practical guidance for running effective morning huddles: keep them short (5–15 minutes), limit attendees (seven or fewer), start at an odd time to improve punctuality (example: 8:06), have the team leader begin then rotate facilitators, and use technology like Zoom or UberConference or gather in a conference-room ritual when possible.
Started off with a huddle and you know, the purpose of the huddle again is to just really get things going in the morning. It's not a problem solving session and it should be very short. You've got to limit these to no more than anywhere from five to 15 minutes. So my notes are up here and we could probably put these up, make them available. Stacy, for everyone. But yeah, Stacey, starting them in the morning is, you know, generally, like I said, you want to get in there and get your day started and get things going. I particularly like to start them at times not on the hour or on the half hour. For example, start them at 8:06. And what we found is, is that when you start a meeting or something at 8 o', clock, then it's kind of like our calls here. This call today starts at 12:00 central time, but it really doesn't get started until 1204, 12:05. You know, people are hopping on late and stuff like that. I bet you if we started this call at 11:57 or 12:04 on the dot, we'd have more people show up on time. It's just, it's a psychological thing, it's weird how that works. But the thing, the secret to a huddle is to start it at kind of an odd time. But everybody has a computer and a clock on their computer, so we're all on the same time. It's, you know, you're not going to get away with saying, well, my Rolex is a couple of minutes late and it's not winding itself, so do that. Start it on an odd time. Again, the length of a huddle, it's short, five to 15 minutes, depending on how many people are in the huddle, the number of people, you want to limit it to seven or fewer people. And if you have more than that on a team, consider splitting it up into two huddles. Who's going to be there? It should be every person that is involved in whatever segment that is. Again, whether it's marketing, sales, closing department, reo, whatever it is. And sometimes you're going to have people that may be in more than one department and they should be in each huddle. Alright, so the next thing is how does it run and who runs it? Well, typically the team leader would start. If you're just starting huddles, you want to get somebody, you know, get a leadership program involved so they can kind of, you know, share the vision of the huddle and help people understand how it works. And then after you've kind of got it into a rhythm or a routine, then it's helpful to pass the baton around and share the responsibility of running the huddle. And so sometimes, you know, you can just pick people at random and say, hey, Stacey, why don't you run the huddle today? And so, okay, great. And so everybody knows the cadence, everybody knows the protocol, what's going on, and so forth. So it's really simple. That helps kind of break the monotony and keep everybody involved knowing that they might be on the hot seat any particular day. The next issue is, how do you do these physically? Where do you do them? Zoom is awesome. This is the greatest tool since they invented cell phones. I mean, really, this is a great tool if you don't have zoom or it's not easy for everybody to get on a video. I mean, you can dial into Zoom, certainly. You know, Uber Conference is another one if you just want to do phone and maybe some screen sharing. But it doesn't necessarily have to be in the conference room. I have some teams whose, when their sales team comes in in the morning, they all gather around the conference room, and they have kind of a morning ritual. It's a lot of fun. They really. They really have fun with it. So you can do that if you have a conference room with, you know, one of the speakers in the middle of the conference table and so forth.
