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.
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.
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 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
Many organisations are making guidance on what tools to use for remote teams in response to COVID-19. The situation isn’t a tools problem. This is a people problem – how can people, who are social creatures, successfully work remotely without physical interaction?
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