Agility Is Even More Urgent For Remote Teams!
Now that it seems that hybrid and even remote work is here to stay, organizational leaders have to settle in and figure out what that will look like.
Many managers are so accustomed to seeing all their Agile teams present on the floor that when the teams are remote they are not sure what to do. Are these still “Agile teams”? Isn’t Agile all about face-to-face communication?
Actually, no.
Agile 2 brings us back to Earth and reminds us that effective communication takes many forms. So being remote really changes very little. We still need business agility. In fact, an article in today’s Wall Street Journal tells us that large companies have been doing just fine with their people being remote—in fact, business is booming. And agility is extremely important. One executive at a mid-size company said,
“Our agility and flexibility as a smaller company helped us see these challenges quicker and react to them perhaps faster than our larger peers,” she said. “You aren’t waiting for a monthly operations meeting.”
Because there has been a lot of pivoting during the pandemic, as consumers shifted their behavior and as supply chains became unpredictable. And it looks like unpredictability is the new normal.
So agility is as essential as always—more-so.
But what does it mean for a remote workforce to be agile? Is it Scrum?
Well agility was never Scrum. We know better now. Agility is about having the right kinds of leadership, and having people know and understand effective approaches for collaboration, keeping each other up to date, synchronizing things continuously, embedding feedback loops in every work flow, and more.
Let’s look at some of the things that remote teams need to do or receive—and guess what? These are all the same things that in-office teams need!
Co-create.
Make collective decisions.
Integrate their work with others on an ongoing basis.
Share information, and keep each other informed (be transparent).
Be coordinated.
Leadership.
Inspiration.
Work incrementally.
Train each other.
Be trained, coached, and mentored.
Be nudged (someone checking that things are moving forward).
These are all the same things that teams needed when they were all in our offices! So nothing has really changed, except that the way we do these things might need adjustment, but we still need to do all these things!
And no surprise, these are all things that pertain to agility, and every one of these things is discussed in Agile 2.
So yes: agility still matters, and Agile (Agile 2) still matters.
Welcome to the new normal!
