With the arrival of the coronavirus, we all found ourselves in an unprecedented situation. From day to day, most of us stay at home for a long time in the home office, and only the phone and computer connect us with the rest of us. There are two ways to respond to this situation:

1. To consider the current situation as a crisis and return the original roles of managers, who are supposed to supervise the fulfillment of all the tasks of their team. For a lot of managers, this opens up a new topic: how to control a team that does not sit in an office and on which I do not “see”? Behind such a decision is the persistent belief that I cannot trust people, or that they are not competent enough.
2. Apply Agility right now — Agile methods were created just for turbulent environments. Which is exactly what we're going through. Agility is based on the opposite conviction — confidence and skill. So I strengthen mutual trust and strengthen the skills of the team.

When and how this happens:

Daily stand-up

“Stand-ups are useless because we talk about the important things in the office. This frequent objection to Daily stand-ups doesn't apply in today's situation. After an entire day in “isolation,” it's just nice to connect with others and discuss who and how we are. It is an important social contact that benefits all of us.

At the same time, it is a common place where one can catch misunderstanding of the task assignment in time, erroneous assumption in the solution, lack of proactive (timely) communication about problems. If, as a manager, I enter a meeting with the belief that “I'm here to check if someone is messing around”, others will see me as a control cop, criticizing a father with whom others feel like “guilty children.” Openness and honesty are gone. Where there is a sense of guilt, there is not a mature, confident approach.

When, on the other hand, I enter a meeting with the belief that “we are going to catch possible misunderstandings or mistakes no matter where and when they arise”, I become a partner who is there for others and the common meeting platform is a safe space for solving my problems.

In addition to the classic stand-ups, we recommend an informal video meeting once a week, which does not have to have an agenda, just to talk about what to do, or maybe play a game together — e.g. “which color, animal, thing represents how I've been feeling lately?”

Sprints or Kanban board and visualization

Stand-up is not a place where work is divided and priorities set. Such a place is Board (e.g. Kanban/Sprint in tool like Jira or Trello) with all key KPIs. Here everyone can see how we stand: will we deliver on time? Do we meet all SLAs?

A simple visualization of team performance should be available to everyone, and each team member should be able to interpret it: “How do I organize my work effectively today? What are the current priorities? Are we moving towards the goal?” For this purpose, the Sprint plan is used, or for service teams, the Kanban board. As a supportive manager, I should aim to develop a skill set for everyone to work with the Board in this way, rather than dividing the work directly. If the team is still turning to me to decide things, the first thing I should ask is how do I build the skill and confidence that they can do it?

Retrospect

Improvement and efficiency are often the first things we abandon in a crisis. We are 100% reactive and we are going down the path of the first solution that comes to our mind. Which often causes a string of erroneous decisions. The biggest crises and fatal impacts are rarely caused by one event -- often it's a string of flawed, reactive, decisions.

“Slow down to speed up”. Battles are won by strategists. It is at the moment of crisis that you need to take a breath, break out of the reactive wheel. Gain a distance and think about what we need to change, improve, streamline. Often the greatest “treasures” do not cost a large amount of time and money, which we do not get in a crisis.

Agility has a tool for this in the form of Retrospective aka Kaizen. In the current situation, we recommend a week/fortnightly retrospective. If I perceive that the team is not able to identify “bottlenecks” and problematic places on its own, as a manager, I bring this context to the joint Retrospective.

Effectiveness of Online Meetings

The effectiveness of meetings is a big issue — it impacts management decisions on how to work with the team. Therefore, before throwing away the above appointments, we recommend that you first think about their effectiveness. Today we have countless online tools that can be used in the current “home office” situation: Google Meetup, Skype, Zoom, Webex. How to increase their effectiveness:

1. Number of people at the meeting — if you require involvement from everyone involved, have up to 5 (max 7) people, which is the ideal Agile team. Otherwise, inefficiency awaits you such as: two people start talking over each other and the next 5 minutes they prefer each other. If you have larger teams, divide them into small groups of 3-5 people. Representatives from each group will then meet at a subsequent “big” meeting, where they will share key things from each group.
2. Visual background — whether stand-up or planning, everything should take place in the context of the Board. Share screen, view summary slides. Or we can use a tool such as e.g. Jamboard by Google and we see virtual leaflets in front of us.
3. presenter -- it also helps if one person (may not always be the same) shares a screen, grants a word, makes inferences. In the beginning it is typically Agile coach/Scrum Master, later on everyone will experience this role ideally.
4. I have my microphone turned off if I'm not talking -- a trifle that does a lot. The sensitivity of some microphones manages to make tea mixing a total rambaiting on the other side. At that moment, the person who is speaking is “muffled”, because the system thinks that it is supposed to bring a stronger sound to the foreground and does not distinguish the rant from the meaningful sentence. They all compulsorily turn off the microphones and only one speaker has the microphone on.

Culture of trust and partnership

A culture that relies on one competent manager overseeing more or less “incompetent” subordinates is very difficult to implement in the current “home office” conditions.

Agility is based on an open partnership culture. If you have managed to transform towards this culture, you have team members “at home” who 1) have the necessary skills — they can communicate problems together and solve them proactively, navigate current goals and priorities and effectively work towards their fulfillment, 2) are motivated - feel responsible for the result, have the inner desire and strength to overcome problems and devote the necessary time to solving tasks. For this, confidence in your skills and the confidence of the manager towards the team are important.

It takes time to build such a culture. If you are not already in this culture, use the current situation as an accelerator of this transformation -- what else do you have left?

1. Quick feedback — quick feedback is a must if we want to build skills in someone. If a team or any member “fails” — i.e. makes a wrong decision, lives in self-delusion (I work little, I work a lot, etc.), does not identify a priority problem in time, they must receive quick and understandable feedback. Ideally, automatically, systemically. It is used for example when we plan together, meet at daily stand-ups and manage all tasks in tools like Jira or Trello.
2. Trust -- if I can't have 100% control, I can at least have confidence in people; if you systematically work on point 1) from an attitude of trust, you build a system that is helpful, not restrictive and purely controlling. If I know that someone is watching me as a police officer or a tax office official, I spend most of my energy trying to make everything “look as expected”.

Opportunity

Every crisis is an opportunity. When the coronavirus situation is over, we have a chance to wake up in a world where we do Agility, or corporate culture, not because of a “management decision”, but because it helped us in a moment of crisis. And it will help in the future as well.