Solving a problem where team members keep being late for stand-up meetings

Problem

I was leading a team of eight engineers, including five developers, two Q&A engineers, and one Product Owner. Every day at 10 am, we had a daily standup meeting. However, most of the time, there were some people missing. My philosophy was to tell the others to start the stand-up meeting anyway, without waiting for stragglers. After the meetings, my engineers usually took a break, updated stragglers about what had been said and began to work around 10:45 - 11 am, with just one hour before their lunch break. At the same time, this team was struggling to meet deadlines.

Actions taken

Of course, my engineers were disappointed when they couldn't meet their deadlines. As their manager, I helped them to notice the correlation between the two events: being late in the morning and being late for deadlines. When they realized this, they began to discipline themselves. First, they started to count late people on a board. The "winner" had to bring breakfast at the end of the sprint. Second, they counted late people at the team level, to make this goal more collective and make people more accountable to each other. Then, they did something even smarter. They counted the number of times they were all at the stand-up meeting on time (instead of counting the number of times they were late) to see things in a different, more positive light. Now, most engineers arrive on time for the meetings. This is not an individual victory, but the victory of the team, and it is celebrated as such.

Lessons learned

My lessons learned are:

• An understanding of the "why" makes people take action. It was not a problem per se to arrive late in the morning, but once my team realized why it was actually important (because they were failing to meet deadlines) they started to discipline themselves.
• It's important to set goals in the right way:
• Set collective goals so each team member is accountable to other people.
• Ensure goals are positive: instead of counting the number of times they were late, they counted the number of times they were all there so they could celebrate more.

"An understanding of the 'why' makes people take action."

"Set collective goals so each team member is accountable to other people."