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A big part of the agile process is bringing together small, project-focused teams that are colocated and meet frequently, specifically, conveying information “face-to-face.” The six-stage agile process sped up time to market, improved collaboration and created product iteration centered on the customer, leading to a wide circle of adoption across industries.
However, the pandemic shelter-in-place mandate upended these assumptions. Overnight, agile teams were forced to disperse and work remotely instead. Agile practitioners, true to form, quickly adapted to lockdowns thanks in large part to technology, including videoconferencing, file sharing and audio calling.
As companies that embrace agile begin to come back to the office, the question now is: Can agile accommodate a hybrid workplace?
Yes, says Tsedal Neeley, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of “Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere” and “The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive
in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI.”
“It’s important to understand that agile does not require colocation,” she said. “Those were ideals that were advanced 21 years ago, and we have now grown.”
Ms. Neeley, who studied remote work even before the pandemic, examined how agile companies operated during the shutdown. Her research found that agile is possible in remote work environments, and, in fact, may have led to more productivity. For example, informal conversations and ideation can be lost during in-person connections; remote environments necessitate documenting ideas in shared documents.
Some business leaders, however, fear the energy and spark built by teams who worked next to each other are now lost, and work will never be the same. Ms. Neeley says leaders’ concern about culture eroding requires a change in mind-set.
“People are actually holding on to a pre-Covid vision of work, working and culture that just no longer exists,” she said. “The fact that people can be very productive when they’re not in the office has been proven. So it’s not about productivity and performance. It’s about fear of culture eroding if people aren’t showing up.”
At AppFolio Inc., a property-management software provider, it took multiple iterations to set up the right environment for remote work. Initially, the company embraced the shift with gusto but realized quickly that back-to-back video calls were exhausting and that workers benefited from asynchronous alone time to focus and produce.
The engineering team deployed additional objectives and key results (OKRs) to improve communication and provide clear goals and direction, said Matthew Baird, a senior vice president of engineering for AppFolio Property Manager. The leadership team said they leaned into these metrics and data to get a better sense of how their groups were doing, given they couldn’t physically walk the halls to check on progress like they used to.
AppFolio wanted to recreate the serendipity of the office, such as chance encounters in the hallway that lead to new connections or idea-sharing. Eric Hawkins, a vice president of engineering, said they experimented with tools that picked colleagues randomly across the organization for short, one-on-one meetings. The opt-in system worked so well that the team continues to keep that practice to build social networks across the organization.
Importantly, the pandemic created a shift in mind-set about a “shared place.” While pre-Covid, the workplace was a physical space, now teams may consider that place to be digital, such as workplace messaging app Slack, Mr. Hawkins said.
“As far as physically where the work gets done, it sort of doesn't matter anymore,” Mr. Hawkins said.
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