Online Daily meeting

How to have an efficient Daily meeting with distributed team? If only I know the solution I'd be happier Scrum Master. I have faced different challenges with different teams. As  I haven't ever been Scrum Master for colocated team I can only imagine how different that would be if all team members are in the same room standing around board.

Personally I feel that when we have these meetings online it goes more easily on reporting mode. Team V had habit to report in Daily meetings in alphabetical order. So every day mr A started and mr T ended the Daily. In the beginning I thought that it is okay as it is easier for them because I didn't have any ball or stick to throw for next person. It was clear for them and I also learned their voices better even if they didn't say who was talking.

After a while I started to feel anxious and I wanted to change the way we do it. Biggest reason was that team V was divided into three sub-teams who worked on same issues. Meaning that mr A  and mr N were talking about work they did together. After mr A another sub-team members told about their work and then we got back to starting point when it was mr N's turn. So together with team we agreed that each sub-team is talking one after another and then we move to next sub-team.

I didn't like that way either. We really didn't get enough value out of our meetings. One person told what he did and others said "I did the same". Even I knew that it is not the whole truth. They were not all the time working on same issues.

Index cards

So after a while I changed again. I took index cards into use. I wrote team members names in the cards and before the Daily meeting starts I shuffle the deck of index cards and ask people to talk in that specific order. I also make short notes on each card what is going on. I believed that this way when team members don't know when they turn is they focus on the meeting and listen each other.

In past I coached a team which was really creative how they run their Daily meetings online. For example once a week they had "colour day". One team member selected a colour and after all people wearing cloths having that colour had their turn last one selected a new colour. It was fun. 

No big news - I believe - that I now after a while I feel we need to do something else. Even we have been able to start talking about ongoing work and asking support it is still too often team members reporting to me or to Product Owner.

I have added 15 minutes Meet after -session after our Daily meeting and more and more we are utilising those minutes. Those sessions are more like what I would like team to have. Should I stop having Daily meetings as such and agree that we don't report - we discuss ongoing work. Might that end up being disaster like there would be team members who never say anything? Focus would be on the work.

Or is it irrelevant that team is distributed and the real issue is that we don't know how to have efficient Daily meetings? Do we even know what is the purpose of Daily meeting? What if we stop having Daily meetings? What I have done wrong? Should I step out and let the team V find out the way that works best for them? What if I simply stop participating Daily meetings?

I seem to have more questions than answers. Perhaps some answers can be found from this short video.