How Remote-Hybrid Alone Work Enhances Agile Teams

When Lena, a software engineer, was hired to join what her new company called a “remote agile team,” she was apprehensive about how that could work. “Remote agile,” sounded like a contradiction in terms. Wasn’t agile, by definition, all about team members meeting often and in person??

In her previous role in a California startup, where she commuted each day to an office, Lena had loved the routines and cadences of her agile work. Every morning from 10:30 – 10:45 the team met in a large, windowed room for a daily huddle. The five of them would brief the others on what they’d done or not done since the previous day. During these meetings, and during the rest of the working day, too, if Lena shared a problem or obstacle she faced, the rest of the team chimed in with solutions. If she pointed out a mistake another team member had made, they were grateful for her careful observations. The ongoing trust, constant communication, and “we’re-all-in-together” spirit motivated her team to collaborate on high-profile product releases on time and within budget. How could any of that be possible if the team didn’t work face-to-face in one office??

Lena’s apprehensions about working in a remote agile team may echo concerns you may have about the compatibility of remote work and agile teams. The agile philosophy of working in teams, initially proliferated among software developers, did in fact prioritize close and frequent face-to-face interactions throughout the day. However, in the two decades since, remote work has taken hold, and agile has proven surprisingly adaptable. Most of its core principles, such as team members’ ownership over their tasks and shared decision-making, remain intact when agile is practiced virtually. Below are some key practices that agile remote teams find helpful for maintaining—and even improving--their commitment to collaboration and autonomy.??

Working Alone Some of the Time?

Agile in a remote context calls for a combination of self-directed solo tasks on team member’s own schedule with real-time collaboration efforts. Instead of constant, in-person collaboration, remote work requires team members to each work asynchronously in order to prepare for spontaneous collaboration. Spending individual time in pre-work or pre-thinking on matters that previously could have been resolved in real-time becomes paramount. Sending out a simple agenda prior to electronic meetings or asking team members to reflect on key items before convening helps maintain the short and efficient meeting processes that agile approaches require.?

Preparing for Meetings

Virtual meeting platforms fail to provide the natural conditions for real-time brainstorming. As a result, asking team members to jot down thoughts on a shared platform prior to group brainstorming is an important shift in remote agile collaboration. As an initial step for proposing ideas, teams can use any asynchronous form of communication they may be accustomed to. For example, before a real-time virtual meeting, team members can compose their ideas in emails, internal social media, or sharable documents that the rest of the team can review and comment on. When the team convenes, members can immediately start appraising certain ideas or home in on challenges that they need to resolve rather than spend valuable time hashing them out in the first place.

Shared Documents

Using asynchronous collaboration tools, such as Google Docs, allows the team to constantly iterate without the “guardrails” or boundaries of a conventional collocated workday. Team members can make comments or suggestions on a shared artifact whenever a thought comes to them—on their own time—instead of waiting for the appropriate moment to broach the subject with colleagues in the office during set meetings, or when a colleague doesn’t appear to be busy. For this reason, remote agile practices that call for a dedicated focus on interacting with actual artifacts undergoing constant iteration can be more aligned with the agile premise than the collocated practice of informal huddles on a whiteboard, which can’t be saved for further discussion beyond a photograph.

For managers, this method is particularly useful to socialize an idea and get the team to make a decision quickly. If you have a collaborative idea that you want to buy in on, it’s helpful to write it up on a short informal document, share the document with the team, and let people comment on it asynchronously. In other words, let the idea converge naturally as people engage with it on their own time. After everyone has had a chance to comment and offer input, managers can convene the team for a virtual meeting to discuss any lingering concerns or final comments. Because everyone has had a chance to communicate their ideas in written formats that are saved for future reference, coming to a decision is often much easier than hashing everything out in a collocated office.

Over the following weeks, as Lena worked from her home office, she became comfortable with her new team and its remote work processes. Regular video meetings were held—happily, she found the candid conversation about their ongoing collaboration approximated previous in-person meetings—but between each meeting, she was tasked with clear assignments to tackle. She soon grew accustomed to brainstorming on the virtual whiteboard the videoconferencing platform allowed. It helped that the team leader emailed with agenda items to discuss before each meeting. At times the team exchanged extensive back-and-forth email chains between meetings or contributed asynchronously to a shared document.? Other times she left on her video feed post-meeting to continue working more closely with another teammate. Lena joked that her new officemate was her large tabby cat, and enjoyed midday walks with a friend who lived in her Minneapolis neighborhood.?

Ultimately, these practices allowed Lena and her teammates to generate and maintain productive collaborative energy in a remote format. The inherent assets of remote work—such as efficiency and speed—were not only compatible with the agile method but directly aligned. As Lena was happy to discover, remote agile teams are not second-rate to collocated agile teams; with some adjustments and in some cases, agile principles can be better served by teams who do not work face-to-face out of a common physical office.

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