In the ’90s, Phil Jackson coached the Chicago Bulls (and Michael Jordan) to six NBA championships over just nine seasons, making him the fastest coach in NBA history to reach 900 wins. One of his favorite coaching rituals was a daily morning meeting.
“What we try to do with our group is breathe together, share the same space,” Jackson said. “Find something outside just playing basketball on the court.” Jackson replicated this practice — and got nearly the same results — with the Los Angeles Lakers later on.
Great team huddles can do this even outside of sporting contexts. They are known to enhance teamwork, support employee engagement, and propel performance across industries.
Below, we’ll share an in-depth guide to conducting huddles your team enjoys, plus advice from experts on navigating common issues that arise.
What is a team huddle?
A team huddle is a short, regular meeting held to align everyone in a company, team, or department on project progress. Also called a stand-up meeting or daily scrum, huddles focus on collaboration and agility in the face of change.
These can be held across multiple levels of leadership, from frontline staff and care teams to the executive level to facilitate cross-tier communication.
What’s the difference between a team meeting and a team huddle?
A team huddle is like a speed boat, while a team meeting is like a ferry. Both get you to your destination, but one turns faster. Here’s a broad overview of the differences:
Why are team huddles important?
Team huddles offer indispensable opportunities for colleagues to build rapport with one another and get on the same page. But, in a 2021 study of teams adapting to a virtual environment during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers observed that social and developmental interactions like huddles are neglected if time is not intentionally set aside for them.
“Scheduled huddles serve as bookmarks,” said Maiysha Clairborne, MD, an organizational culture and employee wellbeing consultant. “They can help teams transition into the day to get present and/or transition out of the day to debrief.”
Even impromptu huddles play a role. “If the day becomes chaotic, if there is an intense interaction or disagreement, or if there is a major disruption of the day, a spontaneous huddle can re-center the team to help them get back on track and make it to the end of the day with some sense of equanimity,” Clairborne added.
Employees also have critical needs that must be met for them to do their best work. According to 2023 Lattice research, these include trust, flexibility, clarity, and regular praise. Effective team huddles can provide all this — even in asynchronous workplaces.
Here's how:
- They build team cohesion. Huddles break down silos by bringing individuals together to “work out loud,” promoting a harmonious exchange of knowledge and insights.
- They encourage open communication. Stand-ups offer a more relaxed space for team members to speak up, share ideas, and voice concerns freely.
- They create connections. Implementing a regular cadence of huddles establishes a rhythm, helping people get comfortable with each other and open up when they need help.
- They increase agility. Huddles ingrain a pattern of continual tracking, allowing everyone to stay aligned while responding quickly to dynamic situations.
- They improve quality. A 2022 study on how scrum affects software quality found that the collaboration, psychological safety, accountability, and transparency that huddles encourage prevent things from falling between the cracks.
How to Structure a Team Huddle
Nobody wants to come away from a meeting thinking, “That could have been an email!”
If all your huddles are nothing more than cheerless round-robin updates, they will quickly bore your team. So, set intentional, interesting agendas involving collaborative problem-solving, morale-building, or decision-making.
Team size, temperament, distribution, and hierarchies will affect how you design your team huddle. But you can start by asking yourself if your huddle meets the following criteria:
- Are the talking points relevant to current projects?
- Can they be covered successfully in 15 minutes?
- Does everyone come away feeling engaged, motivated, and energized?
- Is every member clear about next steps and what they’re accountable for after the huddle?
- Does everyone get a chance to speak?
However you choose to structure your huddles, ensure it’s working for your collaborators. Now and then, send out a pulse survey immediately after a huddle to identify ways to better meet your team’s needs. This could be after you tweak the format or begin a new project.
Observe the survey responses closely, and use this data to better inform your decisions. What do your reports mention most, and what language do they use to describe their work, team, or projects? How confidently are they describing the highest-stakes items on their agenda? This should tell you if you need to modify your huddle format.
If you’re using Lattice, ask the HR team to automate pulse surveys with Lattice Engagement. The tool also allows you to send reminders under the participation tab in the Surveys section.
Borrow ideas from our weekly team update template, or start with a simple huddle agenda like this:
Tips for Successful Team Huddles
Make friends with feedback.
As the huddle facilitator, your role is to moderate and raise the level of conversation while meeting your team’s needs. To better facilitate, review your team’s engagement data in advance and identify the questions and goals for the team huddle. On Lattice Engagement, that could look like this:
Reviewing feedback in advance can help you put written comments in perspective. If you’re looking at manager effectiveness surveys, it can be hard not to feel like the negative comments are directed at you.
However, defensiveness will only make your team hesitate to be honest in the future. As a team leader, be mindful not to take the results personally. To do this, try preparing for or practicing the huddle meeting with someone like a supervisor or member of the HR team.
Engage your team members in the huddle with some open-ended, high-value questions from the results. If things go off track, steer the conversation back in the right direction. Here are a few examples.
- How do you think we can improve on X?
- What would a score of five look like for us on this question?
- Are these scores in our power to change? Why or why not?
- How could we work as a team to address this issue?
- How could making a change here improve our team results?
Be mindful of frequency.
Beware of meeting fatigue, and don’t overschedule huddles. Daily or even weekly huddles may not work for small or distributed teams or for projects that move at a slower pace.
“We’re a remote team with employees spread over different time zones, and the first challenge was finding ‘the right time’ for everyone to be available,” said Jess Rodley, bookings director at Andorra Escapes. The daily huddles were simply too intrusive, breaking everyone’s workflow and concentration.
So, her team shifted to less-overwhelming biweekly huddles and monthly video calls. “It creates a balance that helps everyone thrive.”
If weekly or daily team huddles do not make sense for your team, you can still stay on top of things by sending out reminders for weekly Lattice Updates.
Set the ground rules.
Everyone should agree on the expectations and norms for team huddles. You, the manager, should propose these rules and revisit them every few months to help ensure everyone gets the most out of the meetings.
- Timing: Clarify the cadence of the huddles, and outline the circumstances under which they may be called ad hoc. Emphasize punctuality and timebox the meeting with a hard stop.
- Participation: Without everyone’s ideas and feedback, the huddle loses its value. Huddles should be run “for the team, by the team.” Encourage the team to come to the meeting with an open mind and willingness to participate.
- Survey Anonymity: Refrain from trying to identify who said what in a post-huddle survey. This defeats the purpose, which is to get to a better-functioning team.
Ensure everyone is heard.
Not everyone is comfortable with vocally sharing their thoughts and ideas. They could be introverts, socially anxious, or simply prefer to take more time to think through ideas before commenting on them. You might find that people talk over each other, or that some tend to dominate conversations.
If you work in globally distributed teams, different sociocultural norms around communication and power distance can also prevent people from speaking up.
Rotating huddle leaders can help. Appoint a different team member to lead every meeting, and give everyone a chance to participate by following a predefined sequence for updates and questions.
Also, allow them to add questions anonymously while the meeting is going on.
Make it accessible and inclusive.
Follow best practices to make meetings more inclusive of those who are disabled, non-native speakers of the working language, or on the short end of a power differential.
People with disabilities can be reluctant to disclose their impairments at work or to request help in the middle of meetings. That’s why it’s important to take the initiative and provide accommodations whether or not they are asked for. Consider:
- Using closed captions
- Regularly checking in to ensure everyone is on the same page
- Agreeing to stay muted while not talking
- Emailing screen-shared materials before the meeting
- Sending out invites to debrief after the huddle
Some governments also share meeting accessibility guidelines. In the US, the General Services Administration (GSA) shares an exhaustive list of suggestions. And the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK also provides tips for making meetings accessible.
Remain solution-oriented.
It’s natural for attendees to start dwelling on problems rather than solutions. If you feel like the conversation has morphed into an airing of grievances, avoid the temptation to solve every problem for the team. Interject by asking, “What can we do to make this better?”
Once the conversation starts flowing, step back, listen, and allow your team to explore solutions. Remember to encourage participation from quieter team members and prod for detail when participants seem to be skirting an issue or not addressing potential root causes.
You might be surprised by what your team comes up with independently.
Ensure there are actionable next steps.
Start by asking, “What can each of us do tomorrow, this week, or this month that will make a difference?” Use the tips below to create clarity:
- Set action items and clear milestones for every team member. Everyone should come away from a huddle knowing exactly what is going on, and what they have to do next.
- Ask your team to prioritize issues and next steps. What’s most important? What needs to be addressed first?
- Build out bite-sized action items that are within the team’s control. Sometimes, this means aligning on what the team won’t tackle this time around. There is value in focusing efforts around as few as one, but no more than a handful, of changes or experiments.
- Separately, you may commit to escalating issues beyond your team’s control and reporting back within a week or two.
Don’t make this feel like more work than it is — employee action items should ideally be things that make their jobs easier, more effective, or more pleasant in the long run.
Focus on the team, not just the projects.
Pay attention to team-building and morale even as you’re discussing critical project updates and bottlenecks. According to Alex Adekola, CEO and founder of ReadyAdjuster, some people might resent team huddles if they trigger their sense of failure.
“Having to share progress during a team huddle can be intimidating when you have nothing remarkable to say,” he noted. “This could make certain people feel like they’re incompetent when the reality is that they’re just gradually getting to where they need to be.”
To balance this out, consider adding more relaxed elements: Have people share their struggles and describe how they solved their problems.
Also, create opportunities for meaningful connection. For example, the Lattice Design team looks forward to a ritual called “cooldowns.” Each Friday, a different person leads the team through an activity of their choosing. One designer ran a cooldown where she guided the team in making avatars for each other.
Elevate team huddles with Lattice.
Management huddles allow critical conversations to emerge in a psychologically safe setting. They can augment company all-hands meetings by unearthing and resolving problems at the pace of change.
However, huddles need participation to work. That’s why it is important to send out surveys to confirm that they are a value-add, not encumbering your team’s productivity and happiness at work.
Lattice’s people management software makes this smooth and easy. With its engagement survey capabilities, managers can instantly schedule pulse surveys and access their team’s anonymized responses to drive change faster. This data can facilitate impactful huddle meetings, helping teams resolve issues and ensuring everyone feels heard.
How effective are your team huddles? With this employee feedback form template, you can craft a survey to find out. To learn more about Lattice’s engagement tools, schedule a free product demo today.
