How to Make Sure Everyone Hates the Daily Standup
The daily standup is one of the cornerstones of agile practices, designed to encourage communication, alignment, and problem-solving within teams. It’s a quick, focused touchpoint that helps teams stay on track and adjust as needed to meet their goals. However, when not done well, the standup can quickly become a dreaded part of the day—just another boring meeting that feels like a waste of time.
Unfortunately, many teams unknowingly adopt anti-patterns that drain the value out of the daily standup, turning it into a chore rather than a tool for success. Whether it’s multi-tasking during the meeting, allowing it to drag on too long, or treating it as a status report, these mistakes can leave teams disengaged and frustrated.
In this post, we’ll explore some common standup anti-patterns and how to avoid them, so you can make sure your daily standup is an effective tool for collaboration rather than a meeting everyone secretly dreads.
Multi-tasking
The daily standup functions best when everyone is focused on the sprint goal. Research has shown that humans cannot actually multi-task; we can only focus on one task at a time. If people are distracted, checking emails, responding to Slack messages, or working on other tasks during the meeting, they won’t be able to fully participate as a team. The point of a short daily meeting is to ensure the whole team is on the same page, understanding progress and addressing blockers quickly and efficiently.
Multi-tasking is especially prevalent in distributed teams where the daily standup is done via video conferencing. It’s tempting to zone out or only half-listen when you’re behind a screen, leading to missed details or critical context that could affect the team’s progress. To combat this, encourage the use of cameras during standups to maintain engagement, and ask participants to mute notifications and close unnecessary windows.
When team members are distracted, it impacts more than just the individual’s contribution. It weakens team collaboration, delays problem-solving, and can cause impediments to persist longer than necessary. These small delays add up, and the team’s ability to meet their goals suffers.
Where is everyone?
A clear sign that the team doesn’t value DSU is when members frequently skip it for other priorities. This can have several negative effects. First, the absent person misses the opportunity to contribute to team problem-solving and tactical planning that should happen during the standup. Second, it sends a message to the rest of the team that the DSU—and possibly the team itself—aren’t important to them. Over time, this undermines team cohesion and weakens the sense of shared accountability. A daily standup is a vital tool for fostering collaboration and alignment, but it can’t serve its purpose if team members consistently opt out. Regular absences hamstring the team’s ability to function as a unified group.
It’s fine, I’m fine, everything is fine
When the daily standup is treated as a status report, rather than a collaborative space for problem-solving, team members may feel uncomfortable being transparent about their challenges. In such environments, individuals might gloss over impediments, saying everything is fine even when it’s not. This often happens when the team doesn’t feel psychologically safe—where admitting difficulties might be perceived as weakness or fear of judgment from peers or leaders.
This reluctance to speak up can seriously derail progress. Blockers go unaddressed, productivity slows, and individual struggles escalate into larger team issues. The purpose of the standup is not to showcase progress but to ensure the team can collectively identify and address issues early.
Rabbit trails
This is actually not as bad of an anti-pattern as some of the others in this list, but when one or two team members go off on tangents, the meeting can easily lose its focus, wasting the rest of the team’s time. These off-topic discussions often derail the meeting’s purpose and can prevent important, high-priority issues from being addressed.
To keep the meeting on track, any discussion that is likely to take more than a minute or two should be noted and scheduled for a separate conversation. This way, the standup remains focused on quick updates, while deeper discussions can happen later with the relevant team members.
Inconsistent schedule
One way to ensure that the team doesn’t value the standup—and therefore doesn’t get value from it—is to hold it inconsistently or skip it frequently. This sends a clear signal that the meeting itself isn’t important, and the team will start treating it as just another box to check rather than a critical tool for achieving their goals. Over time, the standup becomes a duty rather than a valuable opportunity for collaboration and problem-solving.
Consistency is key to fostering a culture where the team views the standup as essential to their daily rhythm and success. For best results, schedule the standup every day and at the same time.
Blowing past timebox
A standup should typically take no more than 15 minutes. The reason for this isn’t just to give the team more time for heads-down work, but also to keep the meeting focused and maintain participant engagement. Meetings that run longer risk losing attention, with people becoming distracted or disengaged. When participants know the meeting will be short and purposeful, they are more likely to stay focused and actively contribute.
Also, respecting the timebox sets a good precedent for other meetings, reinforcing the value of everyone’s time. If a standup regularly exceeds its time limit, it's a sign that either too many topics are being covered, or discussions are going too deep.
Status meeting
This is the granddaddy of standup anti-patterns. When the daily standup shifts from being a collaborative tool to simply a status report for the manager, it loses its real value: helping the team move forward. The focus drifts away from solving blockers and planning work, and instead becomes about giving updates to a manager, often causing team members to hold back on deeper issues.
In fact, some organizations don’t allow managers to attend standups due to the Observer Effect. When a manager is present, the dynamic can change dramatically. Team members may feel pressured to perform or sugarcoat problems, eroding psychological safety and discouraging honest conversations. As a result, the standup ceases to be a space for team collaboration and becomes just another status meeting, diluting its effectiveness as a tool for team alignment and problem-solving.
Conclusion
There are a number of strategies to address these anti-patterns. The main ones are:
Focus on the work to be done, instead of who did what.
Remind the team and the manager that the standup is for the team, not the manager
Encourage laser focus by ruthlessly enforcing the timebox
