Daily Huddles

Another meeting type that can be very effective in organizations is what we call daily huddles. This concept's been around for a long time and I want to talk to you specifically about how I've used them in the past in my manufacturing business. Not all teams need to sit in meetings. In fact, typically it's more leadership and mid management that need to have some sort of a weekly meeting where they're coming together. But as you get closer to the front lines, and this maybe doesn't apply so much in professional services organizations as I think it makes great sense in home service businesses and manufacturing businesses. And you may find some other types where this feels like a good fit. But for frontline employees, kind of at the start of the shift or at the start of the day, having a very brief stand up meeting, these are typically three to five minutes. And it's important to be standing up because you want to get uncomfortable quickly so that the meetings don't drag on forever. But what we used to do is at the start of each of our shifts, each production team would get together with whoever the lead was for that team and they would very quickly review what the goal was from the day before and whether or not they met that goal. If they didn't meet the goal, they would very quickly talk about why, what issues there were, what needed to change or get addressed so that we could get back on goal. Then they would look at what the goal was for the day that was the day that was about to start, and did they have any issues or concerns with being able to hit that goal? Lastly, was there anything else we need to know or we need to bring somebody in on? And then we would break, everybody would go right to work. And what started happening was by getting frontline employees engaged in these daily huddles, we would, for example, we had belt driven machines and the belts were, would, would go around bearings that sometimes would wear out. The bearings would eventually fail and it would cause the machine to shut down. These were very inexpensive bearings. If you paid attention, you would know when they were about to fail. They were very quick and easy to change. But if they change or I'm sorry, if they broke during the production shift, the entire machine would shut down and we'd have to go get someone for maintenance, bring them in. We would damage product and it became a big problem. By having these daily huddles and giving people a voice and a way to a platform to really speak up about any concerns they had, people begin to understand the importance of being more proactive. And we would have frontline employees, very unskilled positions that would start bringing up to the team lead that they had a bearing that started to make a funny noise, or they'd share something like that, in which case during a break they we could have maintenance come out, change the bearing and the machine would run. We didn't have as many breakdowns or downtime. We didn't have as much damaged product as a result. It was just a little way to get people more engaged in paying attention to the goals for the day and also being able to bring up things that were concerning them or that they thought could be a problem. And what it did is it also allowed them to have a voice and they felt heard, they felt supported by the team lead and by the rest of the organization and it created more engagement as that was was starting to happen. So if you feel like daily huddles would be valuable, please reach out to your guide. If you want more information, you can also you can search this online to find good examples of different types of agendas and different things people have done with regards to daily hu.