The Importance of a Daily Huddle

By Robyn Yao, Digital Marketing Specialist

Businesses are always looking for the next productivity improvement that will uplevel the way their teams work together.

And sometimes, businesses are just crossing all their fingers and hoping something magical will happen to improve their team cohesiveness and communication.

It’s easy to throw around business buzzwords like seamless teamwork, cohesive collaboration, aligned vision, and accountability, but it’s usually much harder to create routines that measurably improve these nice-to-have ideas. Managers will often lose a lot of sleep wondering how they can actually get their teams to communicate, both among themselves and with other teams throughout the company.

But here’s the thing. What improves the way humans and businesses work doesn’t have to be magic, and it definitely doesn’t have to be another product update or app rollout either. While those frills help, they aren’t what separates a good business from one that flops.

What makes businesses great is the unmagical art of showing up daily and consistently, aligned and communicating.

Communication is a big differentiator and can distinguish an aligned business from a business that is working in chaos.

If you want to know if your business will operate long into the future, you don’t have to look far. You just have to observe—and improve—the basics: communication, focus, alignment, accountability, and how the team works together.

So how do you improve the basics?

One thing’s for sure. It doesn’t take magic!

It takes Daily Huddles. Daily Huddles are the secret—and not-so-secret—magic that makes our business tick. It’s what has grown the legs on this business and made it what it is today.

At Tulip Media Group, when we do Daily Huddles, we go back to the basics by incorporating a communication routine into our days that allows our business and team to continue thriving.

What’s a Daily Huddle?

Daily Huddles are the short, daily meetings that bring us together at the start of a workday. The meetings, while otherworldly, are brief, lasting no more than 15 minutes. They are designed to help us stay focused and aligned with Tulip Media’s vision and goals.

The meetings exist so we can ensure everyone is flying the business in the same direction—not in multiple different ones.

In Daily Huddles, we channel worldly magic that helps the business show up more effectively each day in a variety of different ways:

      ● Staying focused on daily tasks and long-term vision
      ● Aligning work with short-term goals and long-term vision
      ● Creating time and space where teams can have effective communication that allows everyone to stay on top of what is happening in the business
      ● Improving collaboration and teamwork
      ● Identifying and addressing issues before they become problems
      ● Fostering team cohesion and boosting morale
      ● Identifying and sharing best practices
      ● Creating a community and culture of accountability

How to Participate in a Daily Huddle

It helps to have one person running and organizing the Daily Huddle. At Tulip Media, a different employee takes their turn to run it each week.

Then, we all contribute to the meeting by:

     ● bringing questions for the company and teammates;
     ● bringing an update on where you are in your work;
     ● thinking about what is working and what isn’t;
     ● coming prepared to talk about any roadblocks that are keeping you from progressing; and
     ● remembering to talk about our successes too!

While the outcome of Daily Huddles is magical, the art is simple: it’s consistency, its communication, it’s focus, it’s teamwork, it’s collaboration.

Daily Huddles can be an important tool for any business as it leverages the art of simply showing up and communicating—an art lost in most organizations.

By holding these daily meetings and creating a communication routine, teams can stay informed, collaborate, and identify and address issues before they become problems.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, Daily Huddles can be a powerful way to help teams stay focused and achieve their goals. And that, folks, isn’t magic, but sometimes it sure feels like it.