Last October I described how my family started including a daily standup as part of our nighttime routine. This works great when everyone is home, but that’s not always possible. Occasionally I travel for work such as to Chicago last November and Florida last month. But just because we were geographically separated doesn’t mean I couldn’t participate in the family standup–again I looked to how things function for my work team standups.
Everyone on my team works in a different place; mostly we work from home. Of the four members on my core team, we are spread out in three different timezones and four different states. In order for us to have our daily standup, we utilize video conferencing technology which allows us to communicate verbally and with facial expressions and we can also use screen sharing so that we can all see the same thing. Another important factor taken into account is finding a time that works for all of us–my teammates are kind enough to not schedule anything at “o dark thirty” my time and we also take care not interfere with anyone’s family responsibilities such as picking up children from school.
While in Florida, my family used similar strategies to make our family standup work. We don’t have access to enterprise level online meeting tools, but free “social” video chat tools are available that meet our needs. We also had to account for the three hour time difference which we did by moving up our family standup to 8:00pm left coast time which was 11:00pm in Florida. The adjusted time allowed me to participate in the evening activities at the summit I was attending and also get to bed at a reasonable time.
Normally we all sit in the living room, but we had to change that in order to allow everyone to see everyone and also avoid audio feedback from too many mics in the same area. As such, I was of course in my hotel room (mostly lounging on the bed), my wife and Boy#1 were at the kitchen table on one device, Boy#2 and the girl child were upstairs on another device, and Boy#3 was typically in the teen room on yet another device.
It may seem like needless effort and that it would have been fine for me to have missed a few days of family standup, but I believe it was worth the effort and and the value of my attendance was even greater than that of a “normal” standup because there were updates that couldn’t have happened through other informal channels such as around the dinner table. Here are key updates that were shared during these remote standups:
- Boy#1 announced he finally decided which college he will attend in the fall
- Boy#2 described on his progress in his exhausting life guard certification course
- Boy#3 reported on things he was doing with friends and something he was working on on the piano
- My daughter can make an adventure story from almost any experience (and she did), but I mostly remember her saying she loved and missed me
- My wife reported her grades earned in her graduate school class and where she was on her final paper
- I was able to share the experience I had eating dinner beneath the Space Shuttle Atlantis
