How to build high performing remote Agile team ?

As many of know, One of the pillars of agile ways of working is team collocation. Studies show that teams that work together in the same place report higher productivity and effectiveness and better decision making. So, what happens when a disruption such as COVID-19 renders collocation inadvisable if not impossible? Can team members working in remote locations still be agile?

The answer is yes, although most teams—especially those that have been formed recently—will experience some drop in productivity. This should not be cause for concern: it’s just more evidence that collocation really makes a difference. We are also finding that agile makes remote working much easier.

As society adjusts to the impact of COVID-19, agile teams are adapting to new ways of working. With scrum teams largely working from home for the foreseeable future, scrum masters are competing for their team’s attention amid the noise of email, chat platforms, and distractions. While having teams agree to turn on their webcams for meetings is a start, we need to fundamentally rethink how we run meetings in a virtual context. We need to start thinking like game developers, building as much interactivity as possible into our sprint ceremonies.

Running remotely, Agile teams have become comfortable with many tools and practices that can benefit colocated teams as well. Virtual collaboration tools (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Skype), videoconferencing (Google Meet, Zoom, Webex), collaborative whiteboards (Miro, Mural), virtual polls (Poll Everywhere, Qualtrics), work plan management (Jira, Trello), and ways of capturing the voice of the customer or employee (Remesh, Waggl) are now familiar to these teams. Their benefits proven, use by all teams is likely to grow.

Many companies that are working in an agile way say the following agile principles help them become more effective remotely. Here are some of those qualities that you should strive for when working/building your own agile team.

• A unified outlook: High-performing agile teams have a clearly defined charter instilling a “one-team” attitude in them. Team members should collaborate and support each other, and although they will inevitably sometimes argue, they should then reconcile. 
• Rigid Prioritization: Creating backlogs and constantly refining them have made sure that individuals and teams can work on the most valuable things even when they are remote.
• Ownership and accountability in their work: Strong and effective leadership instills a sense of ownership and accountability in the team by giving them enough autonomy to make their own decisions while remaining within the boundaries of organizational values.
• Working in Small, Cross-Functional Autonomous Teams: Small teams build resiliency and make it easier to change direction when needed.
• A high level of emotional intelligence: Emotional intelligence is an important building block of high-performing teams. People should be aware of their emotions at work. Emotions do flare up in social interactions, but the key is handling such situations in a more balanced manner.
• Regular Rhythm of Meetings: A regular meeting cadence helps to make sure that everyone is aligned and enables collaboration when people are working from home.
• A visible culture of excellence: High-performing agile teams focus on process excellence, engineering excellence, and people excellence. This attitude helps to improve themselves and the team, which results in delivering quality solutions to customers.
• Inspiring Agile Leadership: An effective leader is critical to making a high-performing agile team. Leaders of high-performing agile teams inspire the team constantly instead of controlling team behavior. Communication is a leader’s strength. The leader should regularly communicate with the team about the goals and directions of the organization
• A passion for their work: Passionate team members are always an asset to any organization. These people are calm but still full of energy for their work. Passion makes a difference in their output and commitment to the project.
• Alignment on performance objectives with other departments: Because high-performing agile teams work with a “one-team” spirit, their performance objectives are aligned in a similar way. 

At its core, agile is a set of cultural values, principles, and behaviors, rather than a set of specific practices. Teams that remain true to the principles can still operate effectively until life and business return to more normal patterns. The success of remote Agile teams during the Covid-19 pandemic suggests that in the future companies would benefit from combining the best of physical and digital Agile collaboration.

References: https://www.bcg.com/, https://www.bain.com/, https://www.paconsulting.com/, & https://www.forbes.com/