I have found that our daily standup calls are fairly therapeutic for those involved. Occasionally, a call will start with a very salty conversation regarding some topic from the prior day or concerns around schedules, but every single time it eventually evolves into a productive call. Sometimes this takes 20 seconds, sometimes this takes 20 minutes. I have a bad habit of trying to pre-empt or quench a salty exchange in progress, which usually escalates the situation further. I've found the best thing someone on the sidelines of a heated or otherwise pointless exchange can do is to come up with a completely different topic, or propose some sort of compromise. But, at the end of the day it can really help some people when you just let them yell it out for a few minutes on the phone. Doing this all the time is obviously not healthy for team dynamics, but there is always some happy medium between extremes.

One other thing that can help a lot is to have structured calls and ways for people to flag things for mandatory discussion. If I am on a call that starts going sideways, having some established process where I can say something like "Hey guys, can we take a look at <some bucket of flagged items>?" can very quickly right the ship. What this does is effectively remind everyone that we are here to do a job with certain degree of professionalism and diligence. Everyone also has a vested interest in getting to the bucket of review items, because these are usually the topics creating the most stress day-to-day, and talking through them with the team is an excellent means to relieve much of that stress.