Days-in and Days-out

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Hybrid work best practices

by Sagi Smolarski & Yael Rabinovitz, AgileSparks, with guest writer Yael Goldberg Katz from AT&T

As a side effect of the COVID epidemic, people and organizations have discovered working from home can be both productive and more pleasant, especially considering the time wasted on commuting to work and back. 

Workers are now challenging the need to drive to work. At the end of a day in the office, on the way back home, they hit a traffic jam, they ask themselves: “was it really worth it?”… What is your answer to this question?

You probably realize that some office days are beneficial, or maybe mandated by the company, but how will you make it worthwhile for your employees to come to work?

With remote work, it has become harder to keep employees engaged in the organization, as evidenced by an industry-wide rise in employee churn. One underlying reason for this challenge is the breakdown of the social fabric at the workplace. Now you have a chance to rebuild and reinforce that fabric in the office.

Here are some tips to help you make office days worthwhile for the organization, the team, and the individual

Synchronize. Get the whole team in. Do your best to get the full team, and its immediate stakeholders in the office on the same days (i.e. whole group, including PO, Architect, and TA…). Those office days are not nearly as useful if some of the team members decide to stay home, so ideally, shoot for 100% attendance. Of course, once people realize there is value in coming to the office, there will be less need to cajole and convince.

Make future presence visible. Create an invite for office days for all team members. Do this way ahead of time. That way, others in the organization can see when someone is scheduled to be in the office and schedule their meetings accordingly. In addition, this creates more of a commitment and expectation for people to come to the office on these days.

Set core hours. On an office day, you want to maximize the amount of time for common presence, therefore you may want to set core hours during which all team members are expected to be in the office (e.g. 10 AM to 4 PM). You can still provide some flexibility to let people optimize commute time for traffic and personal daily rhythm.

Reorganize the team’s schedule. Reschedule recurring meetings to those presence days (iteration planning, brainstorming, review & retrospective, etc.). This may mean moving the sprint’s schedule to match presence days.

Make time for bonding & fun. Team building / re-building should be a priority. Consider that what people are missing most is face-to-face interaction, so make an intentional effort to make it happen. Schedule it in. Examples: The whole team getting a coffee break together, common lunchtime, celebrations, a short fitness break, or class. Include ice-breakers in meetings. Include at least one fun activity on an office day. Make that day memorable.

Minimize video-conference meetings. The last thing people want is to spend a major chunk of their time in the office in video-conferencing meetings they could have attended equally well from home. If this is the case, see if you need to redesign the presence schedule to match people with others they work with, or reschedule those meetings to remote work days.

Expand your interactions. Think about events/processes that were hard to do effectively using video conferencing, this may be innovation, brainstorming, design, pairing, mobbing, learning, round tables, group meetings, etc. Use the opportunity that you are altogether to hold them face to face.

Go personal. Make time for face-to-face 1×1 meetings. As always in those meetings, take the opportunity to acknowledge people’s contributions, and listen to them deeply and meaningfully.

Give it time. Hold a longer daily meeting and allow more time for off-topic discussions.

Facilitate. Make face-to-face meetings effective – They should be significantly more engaging and effective than video-conferencing meetings, otherwise why bother? Use a variety of facilitation techniques to make it happen, including visual facilitation using a whiteboard.

Do food. Food is the ultimate bonding glue. Here’s your opportunity to use it to its full effect. Spoil people with extraordinary snacks. Although sanitary restrictions impose some constraints, you can still be creative and make it a tasty day.

Make safety a priority. Make sure people are clear on the sanitary rules, and adhere to those. If face masks are required, make some available in key locations so forgetful people have an easy way to comply and save face. At the beginning of each meeting, make sure people are comfortable with the current setting from a sanitary standpoint. Different people have different levels of comfort, and people who exercise extra caution should be accommodated so they don’t feel unsafe and anxious.

Improve. Another day, another opportunity… Toward the end of the day, ask people: “was it worthwhile for you and the team to get to the office today?”. If not, ask for suggestions for improving the ROI. You can also do this using a quick ROTI vote at the end of the team’s last meeting for the day. In addition, you can bring up the effectiveness of the office days in the discussion at your next retrospective.

Subscribe for Email Updates:

Categories:

Tags:

SA
Software Development Estimation
Value Streams
WIP
Agile Mindset
Entrepreneurial Operating System®
Lean Agile
Manage Budget Creation
SAFe Release Planning
ART Success
Iterative Incremental Development
SPC
ARTs
Release Train Engineer
What Is Kanban
Agile Contracts Best Practices
The Kanban Method
Kanban Kickstart Example
Elastic Leadership
Limiting Work in Progress
Jira
SAFe
Certification
Managing Risk on Agile Projects
Applying Agile Methodology
Professional Scrum Master
Lean Agile Basics
Introduction to Test Driven Development
Agile and DevOps Journey
Lean Software Development
SAFe DevOps
Agile Israel Events
Kanban Basics
Agile Risk Management
Lean Startup
Lean Agile Management
Scrum
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
LeSS
Amdocs
Scrum.org
Lean and Agile Techniques
Agile Community
Lean Agile Leadership
QA
NIT
Jira Cloud
Spotify
Agile Program
Software Development
Agile in the Enterprise
Agile Marketing
Jira admin
Hybrid Work
Agile Outsourcing
Story Slicing
The Agile Coach
Kanban Game
Agile Delivery
agileisrael
Nexus
Lean and Agile Principles and Practices
predictability
Process Improvement
Video
Rapid RTC
Tips
Risk Management in Kanban
ROI
Jira Plans
Introduction to ATDD
PI Objectives
RTE Role
Agile Games and Exercises
Accelerate Value Delivery At Scale
Agile India
A Kanban System for Software Engineering
Agile Project Management
Daily Scrum
RTE
Agile Assembly Architecture
Legacy Enterprise
speed at scale
Legacy Code
ScrumMaster Tales
Product Ownership
ALM Tools
LAB
Slides
Pomodoro Technique
Scaled Agile Framework
Advanced Roadmaps
Agile Games
Agile Basics
Product Management
IT Operations
Continuous Improvement
Agile Project
Webinar
Agile Product Ownership
Sprint Iteration
Games and Exercises
Built-In Quality
Principles of Lean-Agile Leadership
Agile for Embedded Systems
Enterprise DevOps
Sprint Retrospectives
Continuous Planning
PI Planning
Engineering Practices
Systems Thinking
An Appreciative Retrospective
AgileSparks
LPM
Atlassian
Frameworks
Lean Budgeting
Agile
Scrum Master
Presentation
Quality Assurance
Lean Agile Organization
Lean-Agile Budgeting
TDD
Program Increment
Nexus vs SAFe
Artificial Intelligence
Change Management
System Integration Environments
Scrum Values
System Team
Achieve Business Agility
Lean-Agile Software Development
Kaizen Workshop
Risk Management on Agile Projects
BDD
Scrum With Kanban
AI Artificial Intelligence
EOS®
Kanban 101
Planning
Scrum Master Role
Risk-aware Product Development
Managing Projects
Releases Using Lean
Nexus Integration Team
Nexus and Kanban
Certified SAFe
Agile Development
Agile Release Planning
ATDD vs. BDD
Sprint Planning
Continuous Integration
Tools
Test Driven Development
Agile Product Development
Agility
Agile Exercises
Kanban
GanttBan
Development Value Streams
Continuous Deployment
Coaching Agile Teams
Nexus and SAFe
Self-organization
ATDD
Large Scale Scrum
Implementation of Lean and Agile
Effective Agile Retrospectives
System Archetypes
lean agile change management
Lean Risk Management
Perfection Game
Implementing SAFe
RSA
Business Agility
Atlaassian
Agile Release Management
Professional Scrum Product Owner
Scrum and XP
POPM
Agile Testing Practices
DevOps
Reading List
Continuous Delivery
Agile Techniques
speed @ scale
Portfolio for Jira
Kaizen
Professional Scrum with Kanban
Agile Israel
Scrum Guide
Covid19
Code
AI
Operational Value Stream
AgileSparks
Logo
Enable registration in settings - general

Contact Us

Request for additional information and prices

AgileSparks Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter, and stay updated on the latest Agile news and events

This website uses Cookies to provide a better experience
Shopping cart