How to run async standups in Slack: template, time zones and setup

The daily standup was meant to take fifteen minutes. On a team spread across three time zones, it takes someone's evening, someone else's early morning, and everyone's focus in between. Half the updates are "same as yesterday," and the one blocker that matters gets a "let's take that offline" and is never mentioned again.

Moving the standup into Slack fixes the scheduling problem, but only if you set it up with some care. This guide gives you a template, a way to time it across time zones, step-by-step Workflow Builder setup, a comparison of standup apps, a rule for blockers, and a way to write "what I did" from GitHub instead of from memory.

What a standup is actually for

The Scrum Guide describes the Daily Scrum as a 15-minute event whose purpose is to "inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal" and adjust the plan. It also says the team can choose "whatever structure and techniques they want." Nothing in that requires everyone to be on a call at the same time.

Plenty of teams already run it in writing. GitLab's handbook on asynchronous work says its engineering teams use "Slack channels and bots like GeekBot" for standups, and lists other teams' question sets as examples.

A written standup has three jobs:

1. Show what moved since the last update, with links.
2. Say what each person is doing next, so nobody duplicates work.
3. Surface blockers early enough that someone can act on them today.

If your format doesn't serve one of those, cut it.

The template

Keep it to three questions. Every extra question lowers the response rate and makes updates harder to scan.