This Meeting Could Have Been an Email: A Longitudinal Study of 847 Standups

Introduction

The daily standup meeting was conceived as a brief synchronization ritual: fifteen minutes, three questions, everyone back to work. In practice, it has evolved into a ceremony of performative productivity in which participants describe what they did yesterday (as if anyone forgot), what they will do today (as if the ticket board does not exist), and what is blocking them (as if blockers are resolved by public announcement rather than private action).

This paper investigates whether any of this is necessary. We recruited 14 engineering teams at organizations we have agreed not to name in exchange for access. Over 18 months, we recorded, transcribed, and coded 847 standup meetings, cross-referencing each spoken statement against the written record in project management and messaging tools available before the meeting started.

Our hypothesis, which we acknowledge was not particularly bold, was that most information shared in standups was redundant. We were unprepared for the magnitude of the redundancy.

Methodology

For each of the 847 meetings, two independent coders reviewed the full transcript and assigned each information unit to one of five categories: (1) available in project management tool, (2) available in team messaging channel, (3) available in both, (4) genuinely new information, and (5) information that raised concerns we elected not to categorize.

Inter-rater agreement was measured using Cohen’s kappa. We obtained κ = 0.91 for categories 1–4, and κ = 0.99 for category 5, which every coder identified without hesitation. Category 5 accounted for 2.7% of all information units.

We also tracked meeting duration, scheduled versus actual, and the number of participants who visibly checked their phones or switched tabs during the meeting. This last measure was excluded from the final analysis because it exceeded the scale of our measurement instrument.

Results

Of 23,419 discrete information units coded across all 847 meetings, 22,777 (97.3%) were determined to be redundant with information available in writing before the meeting began. Of the remaining 642 genuinely novel information units, 431 were announcements that could have been sent as messages. The remaining 211 constituted what we term “ambient organizational distress”: statements that conveyed emotional content without actionable information, typically about a third team or external stakeholder not present in the meeting.

Meeting duration averaged 23.4 minutes against a scheduled 15 minutes, a 56% overrun that was statistically consistent across all 14 teams (p < 0.0001), suggesting that the 15-minute standup is not a target but a fiction maintained for calendar aesthetic reasons.

Discussion

We interpret these findings as evidence that the standup meeting persists not because it transfers information efficiently, but because it serves a social function that no one has been willing to articulate directly: it proves attendance. In an era of remote and hybrid work, the standup functions as a biometric check-in that has been given a productivity costume.

We do not recommend abolishing standups. Our interviews with team members revealed that several employees had formed their only workplace social bonds through standup conversation. Abolishing the meeting would, in several documented cases, eliminate the sole evidence of team cohesion.

References

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2. Slack, A., & Notion, B. (2024). “Written Tools Nobody Reads Before Meetings.” Proceedings of Asynchronous Communication Theater, 1, pp. 7-7.
3. Meeting, M., & Blocker, B. (2022). “Yesterday, Today, and Impediment: A Phenomenological Study.” Agile Suffering Quarterly, 9(1), pp. 1-14.
4. Hypothesis, N. (2025). “Null.” I3E Trashactions on Organizational Inefficiency and Leadership, 1(1), pp. 1-1.