New Year, New initiatives!

We completed an year of operations and at this event we introduced some new initiatives (in-house) for the team. Most important of them to list here are:

• Stand-up meetings every morning
• Weekly round-up meetings
• Monthly one-on-one meetings

Daily Stand-up Meetings

Started from today only, the sole objective of this short meeting is to keep the whole team in sync with what each other is working on. As, in start-ups the teams are generally very small, a strong cohesiveness & co-ordination is required and we think this cannot be achieved if the team-members are not in sync with each others to-do list.

We simply ask three questions to each team member in this short (~15 minute meeting):

1. What he/she accomplished yesterday?
2. What is on his/her plate for today?
3. Any problems he/she is facing in the assigned work?

One more benefit of this is that is becomes easy to co-ordinate & monitor what’s going on each member’s desk.

Weekly Round-up Meetings

We use to send weekly update reports to all our clients on all the items we have finished as well as currently ongoing. This is done individually by the person who is in-charge for a particular project.  Now we have decided to do it internally as a team meeting also so that there are no loop-holes in reporting system and the co-ordination of the projects (as we are a team with some members working from remote locations too, national & international). Co-ordination is a very crucial thing and it becomes bit more difficult when you are a scattered team.

We have been doing weekly meetings on ad-hoc basis but now onwards we will be doing this regularly on weekends. The objective of these meetings will be to track the status of all projects & to check whether everything on track. And if something seems to be in critical situation, immediate attention can be paid.

Monthly One-on-One Meetings

The life in start-up is fun and great adventure for sure, but sometimes there are very critical situations too. And these situations can leave people shaken. And sometimes people are not able to handle the situations, and this can leave hazardous effects on the team members. In start-ups, because it’s a small team we know people well. But, still not everything can be shared in open team meetings (there are always some personal things).

So we decided to do one-on-one meetings with the team mates to know about their problems in work as well as personal (whatever he/she is open to share). And we will certainly help’em to our extent. This monthly meeting with the person will also be his/her performance review as well as counselling session.

Along-with all this we already do fun with team as monthly lunch/outings. In a start-up the team is the most important part, as nobody is doing simply one job but everybody is involved in multiple things. And be believe that the business is because of people only, so it is the most important thing that each and every member is perfectly in a good state of heart & mind, and then only he can contribute his best (which is a must for the start-ups).

I believe that most of the start-ups must be doing this, but still hope this help. It’s worth to give it a try.

Cheers!