How to run daily standups in Slack

Slack is where distributed teams already answer questions, so it is the natural place for a daily standup. There are three ways to run one, from free and manual to fully automated, and a handful of settings that decide whether the ritual survives past week two.

1Way 1: a channel ritual

Pin a template in a #standup channel and have everyone post at 9:00: yesterday, today, blockers. Free and instant. The costs show up in week two: nobody collects the posts, latecomers get scrolled past, timezones fragment the thread, and there is no record of who went silent. Works for teams of three or four with strong habits.

2Way 2: /remind plus a template

/remind #standup "Post your standup: yesterday, today, blockers" at 9am every weekday gets Slack to do the nagging. It still has no collection, no digest, no per-person timezones and no view of response rates. It is the channel ritual with an alarm clock.

3Way 3: a standup bot

A bot DMs each person the questions, waits, collects the answers into one digest and posts it to a channel. That closes the gaps: delivery in each person's local time, chasing handled by the bot, one digest instead of a scattered thread, and history you can query. The settings below use asyncmate as the example, but they apply to any decent standup bot.

4Settings that decide whether it sticks

• Delivery follows the person, not the office. 9:00 in each participant's own timezone. A fixed company-clock time silently taxes whoever sits furthest from HQ.
• A response window with one reminder. Answer by 13:00, one nudge at 12:00. Endless nagging trains people to ignore the bot.
• The digest goes where work happens. Post to the team's real channel, not a #standups graveyard. Digest timing can follow the sun or land at a fixed time before the lead's morning review.
• Three questions, one always about blockers. See what is an async standup for question sets that avoid diary mode.
• Watch the response rate weekly. A falling rate means the ritual is decaying: prune participants, shorten questions or move the delivery time.

5What it costs

The channel ritual and /remind are free. Standup bots typically bill per user per month. asyncmate bills only people who answer, $2.50 a month each, and is free for up to 10 active participants, so a pilot costs nothing. See pricing for how the count works.

Setup in practice: the Create a standup check-in guide walks through questions, schedule, participants and the digest channel in about five minutes.