How a daily huddle contributes to your learning culture

What is a huddle?

A huddle is a short (max. 10 minutes) stand-up team meeting that allows teams to briefly share information and the work to be done that day. But a well-organized huddle is much more than that. It is a perfect platform to inspire others. Next to that, it increases the level of motivation within your team, results in collaboration and more interaction. But on top of that, it is a tool to use for boosting your learning culture.

What is a learning culture?

A learning culture encourages people and organizations as a whole to increase knowledge, competence and performance. It supports an open mindset and shared learning. Increasing knowledge is no longer dependent on a training day. Instead, daily training is supported via peer-learning, deskside job learning or, for example, by scheduling time out to learn via the learning management system on a regular basis. There are many tools to embrace a learning environment. However, a daily huddle might be even one of the strongest.

How to use a daily huddle to boost the learning mindset

During the huddle, you have the opportunity to stimulate the learning mindset of your team. For example, you can ask one of your team members to briefly discuss a challenge that occurred the day before and how they fixed it. Or you ask someone to elaborate briefly about the new functionality in your system. You might also think about having selected one learning point as ‘best insight of the week’. However, don’t forget the daily huddle is not a class. It has to be short. If out of the conversations, more training is required, you’ll follow up separately. Also, keep in mind this requires preparation. During the day you’ll find inspiration for the huddle of the next day. You’ll see what you can use to embrace the learning mindset.

Daily huddle ideas

Stimulating a learning culture is one of the things that are part of a daily huddle. But as we said before, also collaboration and increasing team spirit are big ones. A daily huddle is all about interaction. But, as it is on a daily basis, you have to prevent it is becoming a boring meeting. Therefore, you can use different methods:

Asking open questions: why are we doing something this way?
Using a poll to see what the team finds the ‘learning moment of the week’.
Sharing a short video about the history of the organization to inspire.
Gamifying productivity: ask the people the target for that day and let them know the reward when reached.

Huddle structure

Even though, there are different methods you can use during a huddle, having a good structure is important. Think about conditions like a standard time you start the huddle and a standard place or a structure on what to discuss. In this case, on Monday you’ll discuss for example the learning bite of the week, on Tuesday employee updates, on Wednesday a new customer and so on.

Free game template: ‘Your ideal huddle’

In order to help to (re)structure your huddle we’ve developed the game template: ‘your ideal huddle’. The structure makes the content and setting of your stand-up meeting or huddles more efficient. Same time, everyone gets involved in the idea behind the huddle by playing this game together. You can print the template and start playing immediately with up to six players. The game will help you to think out of the box and review what combination of elements works best for your huddle.

Download game template: ‘Your ideal huddle’

How to organize an online huddle?

Especially in times of social distancing, online interaction and communication are important. You need to know who is doing what, but also you have to keep on collaborating. In this type of setting, it is even more important to start with a daily huddle. It gives structure and is the basis for continuity. Use for example platforms like ZOOM or Microsoft teams to organize your daily meeting.

Your daily huddle up and running in 7 days

A well organized regular huddle is much more than just sharing information on the work that needs to be done. Instead, it’s the perfect platform to inspire others and to increase the level of motivation within your team. This results in collaboration and in more interaction among team members. Getting people involved and setting up your huddle is something that you can do within one week.

Invest one week and you are able to start with or improve your huddle. After 7 days full of inspiration, suggestions, tricks and template, you will be able to:

Define the purpose of your meeting
Inspire others via storytelling
Implement different tools for interaction
Use different templates in practice
Find inspiration easily, without taking a lot of time
Involve everybody
Lead the huddle effectively