De-stressing when you’re working from home with a brisk walk around the block is essential for productivity. There is, unfortunately, all the unwanted breaks. Notifications on your phone. Email alerts that have popped up. A tick-tock video that needs watching. Unfortunately, switching tasks for just a few seconds is ruining your productivity.
Every executive is familiar with the hours long weekly meetings where senior leaders report to the CIO. When the world is rapidly changing and whole divisions work remotely, comprehensive formal reports are good but outdated by the time they’re written.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, remote working is becoming more and more the norm. While employees are starting to settle into remote working, leaders find themselves challenged in ensuring their employees are engaged and productive.
Now more than ever, the ability to respond to change over ‘following a plan’ couldn’t ring truer. Now we are working from home, readjusting to a new ‘norm’, but all the while living in a state of chaos whilst still ‘keeping the lights on’ in the space of not months or years but in weeks, days and even hours. How do executives ensure their agile teams remain productive when working remotely?
The concern is that with remote working, we lose visibility and transparency and may not identify a problem till later down the track when a release or delivery is at risk. We analysed teams and provided executives with transparency of which teams we needed to target for coaching support and guidance to uplift the team’s ability to work remotely, remain cohesive as a team and deliver successfully.
As more and more staff are adjusting towards working remotely, Executives and their programs and teams will need additional support to enable them to maintain productivity, to stay connected and engaged to deliver critical outcomes. Here’s how to address these challenges.
As Scrum masters we are used to dealing with an ever changing, complex environment and that is the sweet spot for being agile and where having an agile mindset is crucial. It’s now more critical than ever, for Scrum Masters to ensure agile practice is maintained and to support teams to continuously improve their practice and self organise but stay connected and focused on the Sprint Goal.
As with face-2-face meetings, online meetings also have an etiquette (“Netiquette”) to make them effective. One of the 12 principles of the agile manifesto suggests face-to-face is the best option but in today’s world of social distancing and WFH, it is no longer an option.
Here are the guidelines we have found useful for having for online meetings with distributed
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