Best Daily Stand-up Tool
Organise fun daily stand-ups for your remote team. Get started in minutes!
What is flat.social?
Flat.social is a creative tool where remote teams can create permanent and collaborative virtual spaces for their teams and projects. Those can act as your remote team’s virtual office or a project space.
With flat.social, each of the participants of the meeting will be able to move around and talk with others who are in proximity. It’s like your physical office but in the virtual!
How to setup daily stand-ups with flat.social?
Daily stand-ups fit in perfectly into a virtual space hosted on flat.social. It’s really simple - you only need to create a permanent project room (takes less than a minute) and distribute the link to your team.
What are daily stand-ups?
While daily stand-ups themselves don't make the team agile, they're one of the most fundamental parts of the process. Daily stand-ups are strategic daily meetings that help to keep the team connected, informed, and on schedule. They include everyone on the team - product owners, developers, designers, and the scrum master. In short, during daily standup each team member answers three questions - what did I work on yesterday, what I'm doing today, and are there any issues blocking me from doing my work?
Tips for productive and efficient daily stand-ups
1. Keep an eye on the clock
Daily stand-ups are short daily meetings that involve the entire product team. Since your entire team is involved, the time is of essence. A common problem that remote teams are struggling with are daily stand-ups that go overtime by going deep into discussions about topics that are not relevant to the entire team.
Solution for this? Make sure that everyone posts and update and a blocker. If one of the updates is showing signs of turning into a long discussion, intervene and ask the participants to discuss this after the meeting.
Another way to act the problem of daily stand-ups meetings going on for to long is to introduce a time box. A team of 10 people can easily finish a daily meeting if everyone is time-boxed with 60 seconds for their update.
2. Everyone need to actively participate
Daily stand-up is a meeting that involves everyone in the project team. Each team member should give their update. It’s a responsibility of the scrum master or project manager to make sure that everyone was involved and participated equally.
3. Show up on time
This one should be really obvious but seems to be a problem in some teams. It’s a short meeting where each team member provides a high-level condensed update of the status of their work. If someone is 10 minutes late, they might miss all the information provided.
4. Make sure everyone focuses on three main topics
By default, each participant of the meeting should answer three questions:
What did I do yesterday?
What am I going to work on today?
What are the things blocking me from doing what I’m supposed to do?
Keeping the daily stand-up update that answers to those three questions will provide all the necessary answers that the rest of the team needs to get out of it. If there is anything longer that needs to be discussed, a separate meeting should be organised that doesn’t involve everyone in the team.
Daily stand-ups in remote teams
Moving to fully remote work might be more productive, but it’s not necessarily easy. Remote teams don’t have a physical HQ where everyone can gather and have impromptu conversations and networking before and after daily standup.
A virtual office created with flat.social will allow your team to have one place to gather whether it’s a daily standup, happy hours or an all-hands meeting.
What are the benefits of daily stand-ups?
1. Better communication, coordination and information flow
Daily updates are a great agile way of making sure that everyone within the team stays updated with the minimum necessary information that can help the project develop. This fast feedback loop will improve the coordination and make sure that the team stays on track. If an issue pops up, it can be addressed quickly.
2. Better accountability
If any blockers or slow downs are happening, they will be immediately visible during the stand-up meeting. This leads to better visibility of issues and being able to track them down as soon as they appear.
3. Improved productivity
Communication, coordination and improved accountability lead to increases in productivity. Everyone on the team know what they’re doing daily which helps to remove any roadblocks that might’ve been slowing the project down.
4. Less need for long meetings
If done right, daily stand-ups are by default short meetings. They should provide as much update to each member of the team as needed. Other, more lengthy and in-detail meetings are moved to separate events where not everyone needs to be involved.
Movement and Interaction
With flat.social participants are not chained to a grid of tiny squares like they would in a classic videoconference. Instead, they can move around the rooms like they would in any multiplayer game.
Learn more about movement & interaction
Rooms & Activities
Your new virtual spaces can consist of multiple different types of rooms. Each room can be different - a mini-game, activity or something special for your team.
Dependently on the type of room, you will be able to host from 10 to 100 simultaneous guests.
See rooms & activities available
Spatial Media
By default each guest can only hear & see others around. Spatial audio and video allows for more natural and spontaneous conversations that are based on proximity, not on the loudest guests.
Want to speak with someone? Simply fly up!
Learn more about spatial audio & video
Collaborative, real-time whiteboard
Add colorful drawings, images, stickers, sticky notes and much more. Whichever room or activity type you choose, you can use it as a real-time collaborative whiteboard.
Build your own space
Build your own virtual space for your team or event by selecting from many of the available rooms and activities.
Each room is special and can be placed in whichever position you want. Fancy a quick retreat on the beach? Simply add the beach elements into your space :)
Physics 💫
Expression
It's so much more than just a plain video-chat. Guests in a flat.social meeting can express themselves through a variety of virtual gestures and customizations on how they present themselves.
From becoming a godzilla to doing a frog dance, it's all built to be playful and interactive.
Presentations and Screensharing
Engage your guests with interactive presentations and talks by using the spatial screen sharing and broadcasting features! Whether you're giving a talk or want to present something with a real-time video stream, sharing the live screenshare will be an experience that seamlessly integrates into the virtual space.
Frequently asked questions
What are the fun features of flat.social?
From flying around to playing football and doing a frog dance, there is plenty! We built those features to make flat.social the most fun place to organise an event online. Read more features that we built.
Is there a need to install anything?
No need to install anything new. It all runs in the web browser both on desktop and mobile. Safari and Chrome are doing great, Firefox is catching up!
Do you support simultaneous screensharing?
Yep, a number of participants can screenshare at the same time. Those can be positioned next to each other or distributed in various locations around the virtual space.
How much does it cost?
Check out thepricing page to see free and pro plans available.
Can I use it as an alternative to ZOOM or Microsoft Teams?
Sure, if all you do is fun and creative meetings! (we sincerly hope so:)
Over the past 3 years we learned that while ZOOM and Microsoft teams are amazing tools to keep you productive, they're not optimized to to keep a group of people connected, engaged and happy.
Hence, flat.social was created. It does not aim to be a complete replacement - it's an addition for when the priorities switch from productivity to human interaction. It's here to bring smile and show that spontanous creative moments and connections can happen without having to travel to an office or an event venue.
How do participants move in a flat.social meeting?
Meeting attendees can use WASD keys like in multi-player games or drag themselves around with a mouse.
How do I speak to all of the guests at once?
The experience is spatial by default - only ones around will hear you. You can however use the loudspeaker feature to speak to everyone at once. It's useful if you want to make an announcement or managing a larger workshop where attendees are distributed around the room.
