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Agile in isolation

Corina Modorcea

Lean Sig Sigma Green Belt | PMI-ACP | PRINCE2 Foundation and Practitioner | ITIL Foundation Trainer | ITIL SO | ITIL ST | NLP Practitioner & Master

发布日期: 2020年4月29日

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by Corina Tiganasu & Adela Rus

Agenda

1. Should we be afraid of Remote Work?. 2

2. Remote Engagement and Motivation. 3

3. Making work visible. 6

4. Avoiding micromanagement 7

5. Work Life balance. 8

6. Key Takeaways 10

1. Should we be afraid of Remote Work?

(credits: https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2017/11/14/how-zoom-employees-use-zoom/ )

For the past few years, the IT world was built around the Agile mindset.

Agile thought us about the advantages of collocated teams, how to build team’s trust and maturity based on Individuals and Interactions. Many companies jumped into designing their offices based on Agile principles. First, open spaces ensure a free flow of information which naturally leads to what we call ‘osmotic communication’. This way, we could obtain relevant insights by overhearing conversations or simply noticing things happening around us, in the end leading to improved collaboration within teams.

Working from home was a flexible benefit for the employees but at the same time a taboo subject for many, mostly because ensuring collaboration, osmotic communication, interactions were challenging topics.

However, in these times where social distancing and self-isolation are the norm, we learn that “far” is not necessary measured in distance but in how engaged people are. While working remote we noticed more and more that Agile principles stay the same: collocated or isolated.

Call us optimists during crisis but we managed to welcome change and with this article, we would like to share you with our observations from the many isolation days. (who counts them anymore?)

2. Remote Engagement and Motivation

We will start by looking at Maslow’s needs pyramid applied in the work environment.

(credits: https://www.cvtemplatemaster.com/careers-advice/2018-i-quit-job/)

1. Functional Needs — basic issues of survival such as salary and stable employment situation

As an agile enabler, start by putting yourself in your people’s shoes.

If difficult measures need to be implemented, act as fair as possible by taking your time to talk to people, listening more than you talk and the most important part, do not take people by surprise. If you are transparent about the context and how the company might be affected, explaining why certain measures need to be taken, having in mind how they will impact your people’s lives instead of focusing purely on the company’s profit, there is a greater number of chances for the employees to have your back, understand the measures and eventually accept them.

More coaching during 1:1s, morning coffee calls, ad-hoc calls if needed, do nothing but encourage communication, especially when working remotely.

2. Security Needs — stable physical and emotional environment aspects such as benefits, pension, a safe work environment, fair work practices.

People expect to hear more from their leaders; With this thought in mind, make sure you regularly communicate the strategies put in place, back-up plans, changes within the company, even the accomplishments. Build trust by being human and put your personal notes in the communication. Aim for building a positive attitude so that they can say: ‘behind the email/screen there is an actual person that is concerned for my needs, has the same fears as I do, faces the same issues but still, managed to be positive and look with confidence at the future.’

3. Social Needs — social acceptance matters such as friendship or collaboration at the workplace

Try to replace and encourage the usual breaks people had at work. By replacing physical distance with virtual social intimacy, you can support your team grow even stronger.

Here are some examples of fun retrospectives or team bonding activities:

· Play short games together, such as a 15 min fun quiz. (Kahoot or Fibbage offer plenty.) A good laugh with the entire team, strengthens the relationship and target the dynamics to the sky.

· Call your co-workers for a coffee break and talk to them about an issue you are facing. Even more, don’t limit yourself to pair programming but call the entire team for mob programming sessions.

· Send pictures of your lunch or share recipes than can be cooked and eaten in an hour. We noticed everyone is becoming a chef these days :)

· We are sure you have all shared pictures of your remote desks already. How about organizing guessing contests? Whose coffee cup is the one with unicorns, whose is the black duck?

· Take 5 min at the stand-up to share fun facts, personal stuff, new passions developed, or simply new ways discovered to spend the time inside.

· Share movies, books, recipes with each other. Even do a book club and discuss ideas — if now we don’t have the time, when will we?

· Open your camera in meetings. You all know how you look like at work but having the chance to be seen without a suit, makeup, wearing your jumper, hear your dog barking or your kid shouting; All these take the team relationship to a different level.

· Quick hint for the HR guys: organize sports classes that people can join. Just because we are inside, it doesn’t mean calories cannot be burnt while having a little teambuilding going on.

· Put a personal touch on all the calls you give and receive. This will encourage people to be more open and will create that safe environment we are going to explore a little bit later.

Besides the little work breaks tricks, you can try Fun Retrospectives. As a matter of fact, you may take some inspiration from https://www.funretrospectives.com/ given you are not yet familiar with it.

We found so many things about each other during “The roles we play” retrospective (https://www.retrium.com/). It led to interesting conclusions such as: finding out that many of us liked to hike and run, others had Cupidon superpowers in their past experiences while other’s Kryptonite was working until late. These are just a few examples of how not to neglect the social needs of your team members even during social distance times.

(personal archive: https://app.retrium.com/team-room/9e317471-c71b-411a-8afc-14cf3fe7b156)

Or you might get some inspiration from our former team colleagues who organised a live pancake cooking session — an idea we strongly support.

(credits: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/betfairromaniadevelopment_remotework-suddenlyremote-homeofficefun-activity-6651835284453408768-5SFg)

4. Esteem Needs — respect and recognition matters such as job titles, appealing workspaces, and prestigious job assignments

At this point, we would dare to say that active listening, observation and coaching could be done even better working from home. Usually many devs are not quite the most talkative ones, but when everyone is on the other side of the screen, the only way to express yourself is by talking.

Sometimes people know exactly what motivates them, what they want and where they are heading, whereas sometimes they haven’t the slightest clue about any of them. Take some time to constantly check this with yourself and if you are a manager, make sure you regularly ask your team about it. Even if they don’t have the answer right away, it will give them something to think of. Coach them to find out and use every opportunity to observe your team’s skills and recognize their merits. Help them along their career path.

After our second week of isolation, one of my colleagues said he wants to do a time management training followed by a leader’s training. He is one of the colleagues having difficulties in answering what truly motivates him. By talking to him I discovered that he was looking for a way to better organize both his work and speech. When mentoring others, he felt he was talking too much, without pointing out the most relevant information, even though this was one of his favourite work activities. After this talk, we commonly decided that the best option for him would be to attend an inhouse coaching programme.

A last tip for ensuring prestigious job assignments, would be to pass over the leading role during different agile ceremonies. Participating in decision making boostsa self-respect, a need which is extremely important to take care of in order to have a powerful, motivated team.

5. Self-Actualization Needs — achievement matters such as workplace autonomy, challenging work, and subject matter expert status on the job

We love Steve Jobs’ quote: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

For some people it might be difficult to delegate, for others not to micromanage, other face difficulties if they are not doing the task by themselves, or at least get it done their way. Overcoming these obstacles might create win-win situations for all sides because it creates space for everyone to grow.

In the end, the purpose is to take your teams through all development stages, ideally focusing on the performing one. As an agile leader, without self-organizing team members who trust each other’s expertise, this could be a real challenge.

3. Making work visible

A challenging task during remote work could be to make your work transparent, since you are not sharing the same space with your co-workers and they can actually see you in action.

To always on top of things, a good tip is to prepare for every meeting beforehand, so you have all the input at your fingertip and keep it short. Before the stand-ups for instance, take a few minutes to write down the main ideas so that you give a clear image of your progress and eventually of your obstacles.

Preparation ahead is key. Another idea is to make sure the product backlog is up to date and prioritized as the team’s rhythm of work might change and a clear picture of what comes next is always useful.

If we are taking it offline and talk about communication channels, we as agile enablers should ensure that all team members are able to quickly and efficiently communicate with one another throughout the lifespan of a project. This could easily be done via a team channel, as we are sure you are using one as we speak.

One of the few things that unites us all, regardless of the current isolation period, is that “We don’t like meetings!” There is no surprise that all teams have their channels to communicate with one another throughout the lifespan of a project. To actually make them usable and keep the communication flow going, you can: share a funny meme or some scenes of IT Crowd (ofc the British version!), or simply some music bits you discovered.

Try to make most of the decisions via email (cc-ing all your team) and keep the video calls only for unclarities or things that require urgent handling. More meetings don’t always mean more productivity, so try to keep your team safe from interruptions. As you maybe recall, it takes an average of about 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption, therefore we as agile enablers, we should really have in mind setting aside uninterrupted blocks of time for focusing for our teams.

Finally, proactivity skills matter more than you think in a remote context. Don’t expect someone to come to you and ask for status/project/issues updates but take initiative and ‘communicate first’. This will not only lead to a safer, trust-based environment but also you ensure transparency of your work.

Quick hint: Before expecting it from the others, be sure you are already doing it.

4. Avoiding micromanagement

‘’I perform better under strict micromanagement’’ said no employee ever.

As an agile enable, it is within our responsibility to be a servant leader and maintain a healthy morale within our teams. Micromanaging will take you as far as possible from that objective, leaving you with frustrated teammates and a toxic work environment.

Focus on creating a trust-based culture while keeping in mind that you are not working with toddlers that need supervision, but self-motivating individuals who are ready to take responsibility.

Quick hint: at the end of this article we will provide some book recommendations on the motivational theories behind our actions. Keep reading :)

So, what should we focus on, in order to (un)intentionally avoid falling for these micromanagement traps?

· Give team members autonomy to make their own decisions and support them from the background.

· Form small groups within the project and assign a responsible for each one. This reduces direct supervision and encourages people to take initiative rather than following headlines.

· Ensure all stakeholders know the what is expected and how things are run during the project lifecycle, so that you avoid devs being interrupted by adhoc requests.

· Inspect and adapt by scheduling retrospectives. This is a great opportunity to also analyze the confidence levels within the team and look for improvement opportunities. After all, half of the planet working from home is quite a change, isn’t it?

· Make your colleagues feel comfortable and safe — it always works to have a separate chat channel for informal discussions where they can share their first thoughts on some matters before facing the clients, but also personal stuff. Especially in the CoVit19 context, maybe some parents/pet owners have some best practices to share with the rest of the team. Learn together.

· Be consistent when it comes to managing expectations of yourself and others. Try to develop a culture of ‘’say what you will do and do what you say’’. Of course, it is easier said than done, but what if you start with yourself?

· Instead of asking for constant updates, regularly encourage your teammates: recognize them during meetings and give the credit for their work.

· While keeping in mind all the above, please don’t forget about the Parkinson’s Law. If something must be done in a year, it will be done in a year. We usually tend to fill up all the time allocated to a task, regardless of its complexity. Programming makes no exception out of it. Try to understand this and see how you can turn it in your favour — but this, in a future article.

5. Work Life balance

This one is a heavy one.

It was heavy while we were going to our offices, what about now?

Kübler-Ross explains how the human mind processes change going through similar patterns: disbelief and denial followed by anger, rage, and resentment, emotional bargaining beginning with anger and ending with depression and finally acceptance.

The change curve is a powerful model applicable in any field, both personal and work oriented. As soon as you understand the stages you are going through, you can fasten the process and climb on the curve.

(Credits: Change curve. Source: Kübler-Ross (1969))

Basically, it has to do with severe discipline and forming a routine that can separate these two. Again, easier said than done. Still, we tried to think of some best practices in order to give you an introductory routine:

· By any costs, avoid heading over to the computer first thing after you wake up. Instead focus on your old habits — take a shower, have breakfast and change those pajamas. Really, do change them. On the long run you will find yourself in a very depressing loophole where you no longer distinguish what is work and what comes after work.

· Designate an area which is 100% focused on work. No kitchen, no sofa, no balcony. You want to avoid constantly wanting to snack, thing which is naturally associated by ours brains while working from the dining table for example.

· Follow the office hours. After all, it’s the same work just the setup is changed.

· Take timed breaks. Since we are left to make our own schedule, for many of us this can be quite a scary thing. Researchers say to set alarms to have some short breaks every 90 mins — enjoy them as much as you can. Stretch your body, take a fresh air on your balcony, rest your eyes. It’s the little things that count.

· Find after wok hobbies — days can feel repetitive if you don’t have something to break the working rhythm. From binging to video games, spending time with your family, painting, puzzling, reading or writing, find those activities that make you feel better about this whole isolation thing.

· Transform the problems into opportunities! For example, since many businesses have been closed, some of their activities shifted online at much better charges: Pluralsight comes with #FREEapril offering painting, cooking or self-development courses; If you postponed any old dreams for whenever you’ll have time, now is the best chance to do it.

· Build good habits, think about what you want to take with you once this is over.

· Last but not least, it might be good to remember the words of Friedrich Oetinger: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference’. Make a list of things that are in your power, and things that you cannot control. Ask yourself how you can contribute and increase your emotional resilience. This might be a great asset even when the crisis passes.

If you identified other tips or great ideas, feel free to drop by and let us know.