Ten minutes before the shift: what the team needs to know before the work starts

“Delay is at 2.8%.”

You could hear that sentence in any briefing. It is accurate. It may even be important. But if the shift then starts and nobody knows what to do differently, you have given information, not direction.

This essay is about those few minutes before the work begins. The shift briefing is perhaps the cheapest management tool there is: it needs no system, no budget and no project. It only needs someone who knows what to say, and what to leave out.

What I have and what I do not

I am writing this from two places I have worked: last mile and a hotel. For both I have real material, but not for every detail.

In last mile I have the daily morning stand-ups documented. I do not know for certain who led them each time, how many minutes they lasted or whether they always took place on the loading dock, and I will not fill that in with guesses.

In the hotel I experienced handovers between shifts more than a classic ten-minute briefing before a shift. There was a Front Office Daily Stand-Up and a handover sheet that linked the night, early and late shifts. Here too I will not say how long it took, who led it or whether it was held standing up or in the office.

And I will not claim that, as a Team Leader or Area Manager, I changed the format of the briefing in some particular way. I am not certain enough of that to present it as fact. What I can say is what I saw, what I think makes a briefing worth having, and why.

In last mile: numbers, reasons and concrete points

The morning stand-ups were clearly tied to the day's operation and to the KPIs. The topics we covered included:

• Damage %, Incomplete %, Delay % and Loading Time;
• the main reasons for delays;
• 5S and discipline on the loading dock;
• scanner ownership, meaning who is responsible for which scanner;
• safe stacking;
• SOPs and QA;
• follow-up with the DSPs, the delivery partners;
• cold chain checks;
• alignment between Last Mile and Outbound.

So it was not just “how did yesterday go”. There were numbers, reasons and concrete points that had to be put right.

What made it worth having was when the briefing connected to something people would experience straight away in the shift. If Delay was the problem, it was not enough to state the percentage. You had to look at why it was happening. If the problem was linked to loading, to stacking, to driver performance or to a step in the process, then the briefing had value, because it gave the team one concrete thing to watch during the work.

That is how I wanted to see the stand-up: KPIs, 5 Why, Pareto, 5S and safety not as separate topics, but tied to the real impact on the operation. It is the same idea I wrote about in KPIs do not improve in Excel, except that here you have ten minutes to do it.

A briefing makes sense when a KPI turns into a clear behaviour or action.

Information or direction

A briefing loses its value when it stays with the numbers.

If you say “Delay is at 2.8%” and then the shift starts, but nobody knows what to do differently, the number has travelled from the report to the team without changing anything along the way.

The difference is small in words and large in effect:

• Information: Delay is at 2.8%.
• Direction: Delay is at 2.8%. The main reason we are seeing is [the reason]. Today, while we work, everyone watches [one concrete thing].

The second version takes ten seconds longer. But it is the only one the team can take with them into the shift.

In the hotel: the night does not start from zero

In the hotel, the night shift began with the information coming from the Late Shift and ended with the information it passed on to the Morning Shift.

So the work did not start from zero. There were open items, cases that needed follow-up, technical problems, guest issues, payments or operational matters that had to carry on.

The handover covered arrivals, complaints, billing and payment issues, VIPs, technical issues, special arrangements and follow-up tasks. The Front Office Daily Stand-Up sheet also recorded departures, occupancy, no-shows, open cases, room moves, traces and other operational matters.

I have written at more length in the essay on the handover about why this passage is so underrated. Here I am interested in something else: what happens to all that information in the first minutes of the shift.

The handover and the briefing are not the same thing

For me this is the most important part of the essay.

The handover tells you what state you are inheriting. The briefing decides what matters now.

The handover has to be complete. The briefing has to be selective. If the briefing becomes a reading-aloud of the handover, the team hears everything and does not know what to hold on to.

That is why a good pre-shift briefing should start exactly where the handover ends:

• What did we receive?
• What has changed?
• What is the priority?
• Who needs to know?
• What must not get lost during the shift?

The ten minutes before a shift are not for telling everything we know. They are for deciding what the team needs to know before the work starts.

The ten-minute briefing template

This is the template I would propose. Five questions, about two minutes each. It is not a form to fill in, but the order of the conversation.

1. What are we inheriting? The state from the previous shift or from yesterday: the open items and the cases waiting for follow-up. The source is the handover, not someone's memory.

2. What has changed? Only the changes that affect this shift: the volume, a process, a system, the team.

3. Where is the risk today? Where something is most likely to go wrong: a KPI that is slipping and its reason, an open item with a deadline, a technical problem.

4. What are the two or three priorities? Not ten. Each one said as an action the team can see during the work, not as a number.

5. Who holds what? Every priority and every open item with a name. A task without an owner is very close to a task nobody will do.

What does not belong in the briefing: the full story of yesterday, numbers without reasons, and any discussion that needs more than a minute. Those get noted and taken after the briefing, with the people who need to be there.

How you know it worked: after the briefing, ask one person from the team: what are today's two priorities? If they cannot say, the briefing was information, not direction.

A good briefing is not measured by how many things were said. It is measured by what the team does differently in the first hour of the shift.