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With the world shifting to a work from home environment almost overnight, many businesses and business leaders found themselves unequipped to deal with the sudden shift in dynamic. The world is running an experiment in home working at a scale we would never consider at any other time.
In the first week of April 2020, Michael Page Middle East hosted a webinar featuring guest speaker Mark Gray, AGILE Coach and Practitioner (former Emirates Airline Agile Coach with over 30 years’ experience). Mark covered topics such as self organisation, process improvement, clear communication, productivity measurement and defining value in a work from home environment. We summarize the takeaways from the session below.
Business change on this scale is normally undertaken after extensive investigation and thorough planning. Time and planning areluxuries we unfortunately can no longer afford. In today’s environment the following practices now need to be urgently considered and re-evaluated:
How do we support the well-being and ensure the productivity of the workforce?
What are the best ways to stay connected to our teams and engaged as employees?
Are commitments given to our customers, and by our suppliers, still feasible?
What do performance reviews and appraisals look like now?
How do we rapidly adapt to constantly changing situations?
Teams built on Agile principles create a workforce that is better enabled to deal with distributed team members, periods of uncertainty and shifting parameters. Adopting Agile principles now will offer short term improvements and build the basis for longer term business change and transformation.
Periods of great change and uncertainty present new business opportunities and markets that can be exploited. Trying to maintain the current (old) way of working and approaching problems in most cases will not be sustainable in this new environment. Agile teams are:
Great at remote working
Require minimal management intervention
More productive
Enablers of employee empowerment
Adaptable to change
Structure and Setting
Maintain a schedule to give structure to your day
Even working at home, you should have a start and end time
Agree core working hours when all the team will be available, this should cover at least 75% of the working day
You should be as contactable as you would be in the office
During breaks you usually have a chat around the water cooler, try to maintain this habit with other home working colleges
Agile Principles
Have daily virtual stand-up for the whole team at the start of core working hours to plan and check in with colleagues
Break work down into small meaningful pieces that can be completed in a few days at most
Always work in at least a pair and maintain an open communication channel at all times
Strict scheduling of interactions involving a large number of people is essential combined with good conference discipline
Managers have to take a passive role and trust the team to deliver
Virtual Meeting Best Practice
Prior to a meeting ensure that an outcome and timebox are assigned and understood
If possible, issue an agenda along with expected timing
Ensure everyone has the video enabled for the human element and connection
Follow up conversations between subsets of the group should happen immediately
Nominate a chair for the meeting and have them start by reminding people of the ground rules, this role should rotate around the team
Technology Enablers
Reliable internet connection and phone line are essential
Check microphone and camera are working prior to any meeting
Allow the team to choose their preferred collaboration tools
Effective collaboration needs multiple active communication channels
Creating a dedicated work environment
To learn more about how you can quickly and easily adopt some basic principles of Agile into your organisation we highly recommend watching the full recording of the webinar.
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