Mix Up the Incentives for Being on Time to Daily Standups

it could be different ways to incentivize team members to show up on time for the daily scrum. The most common of which is still to charge anyone who arrives late a small fine, usually 10 ₹ here in the India.

Starting with that example, course participants share other examples of incentives they’ve used to encourage people to arrive on time. I’ve heard about teams using incentives like these for anyone who arrives late:

• Sing a song at the end of the meeting
• Tell a joke
• Bring some sort of treat (such as cookies) for the team the next day
• Do a pushup for every minute you’re late
• Wear a “hat of shame” during the rest of the meeting
• Be the first one to give an update at the next daily scrum Each of these can be a fun idea for a team and might have its place with certain teams. You need to be careful with some of them, though.

For example, I wouldn’t select bringing an edible treat the next day if one team member has food allergies. And I’d be careful about things like exercise as some team members may have physical limitations (including ones you may not know about).

But as long as team members agree that being late to the daily scrum is a problem for them, and can all agree to a particular incentive, then doing something like this can be a fun way for a team to remove the impediment of chronic lateness that affects some company cultures.

Of course, we should also be on the lookout for root causes not solved simply by motivation. Perhaps, for example, the meeting is scheduled too early for the team’s chronically late arriver because he or she needs to drop a kid off at daycare and can’t do that before a certain time.

For years, I’ve worked with teams that selected one incentive to get people on time. But I was given a wonderful tip by a participant in my CSM course.

She suggested having multiple incentives for being late. The suggestions are each written on a piece of paper and put in a box. Any time someone arrives late, that person draws one randomly from the box and does what it says.

I thought this was brilliant. The element of surprise adds a bit more to the incentive, I think.

After all, one team I worked with picked singing a song as their incentive until they discovered one team member had been an opera performer in her past. For a new chance to sing, she loved arriving late! Perhaps, though, she would not have liked telling a joke or doing a pushup.

I love this suggestion of mixing a team’s incentive and love learning from my course participants. That helps me succeed with agile!