In the final part of Working Together and Apart in a Time of Crisis, I look at how the maturity of teams has had an effect on delivery outcomes during lockdown and what lessons we may want to learn for our future workplace.
Maturity Matters
One common factor for all the teams I have been working with during the lockdown is their level of maturity. These teams have been in existence for a while and whether wholly co-located or partly distributed before Covid-19, they have had time to work together, build trust and psychological safety. Using the famous Tuckman model of ‘forming, storming, norming and performing’ to measure their maturity, these teams have all been in the norming stage or beyond.
At this level of team maturity, the lockdown and sudden dislocation has really had very limited impact to performance and how the teams have worked together to continually deliver value. We have not seen any breakdown in trust or other dysfunctions. Working with their scrum masters, the teams have been able to adjust their ceremonies as needed to modify working practices to better suit this new environment, In particular, many have moved to more frequent but shorter refinement sessions to keep the backlogs topped up without over-stressing the teams during ideation.
“The dangers of evolving poor practice and emergent anti-patterns in new teams may be the best reason to continue with physical co-location”
I have no deep reserve of experimental data on how teams with lower levels of maturity have faired in these circumstances. But it seems reasonable to assume that it must be tougher to build trust between members of a brand new team and perhaps harder still to successfully onboard new people to an existing team. In these situations, absence of bonding time in and out of work or limits to screen time must surely slow down development of psychological safety.
While lacking the capability to support physical proximity, we may see teams in the process of forming are not only slower to build trust and optimise their working practices but also fail to identify, expose and resolve underlying issues.
The dangers of evolving poor practice and emergent anti-patterns in new teams may be the best reason to continue with physical co-location when we are finally able to return to a level of working normalcy. I would argue that some level of physical co-location is required for incubating teams as they form or onboard new team members. Once happily settled into higher levels of maturity, all the evidence I have points to an ability for teams to be much more flexible in location strategy. They can choose the best arrangements for themselves when given access to the right tools.
And these best arrangements may be a hybrid approach where for the majority of time, team members work remotely from each other, albeit with seamless communication and collaboration through use of the right tools. The teams may then decide to reconnect in physical co-location from time to time, meeting face-to-face, for example, to conduct retrospectives or when a particularly complex refinement session is expected.
Workplace of the Future
So what lessons should we take away from here? We have been given a chance to review our model of the workplace by our experiences over the last few months in lockdown.
We can take the opportunity to transform our understanding of the purpose of the office. Perhaps now is the time to stop seeing the corporate environment as the central location for all work of meaning and save those millions of commuters spending stressful hours transiting in each day to meet the mandate of sitting next to each other.
Instead, we may reimagine the office as a hub, servicing need for physical proximity to incubate newly forming teams and as a meeting location for existing teams in search of ad hoc reconnects.
Perhaps we can better put our efforts into the provision of superior tools to ensure our people have everything they need to collaborate effectively from wherever; to co-locate without geographic impediments.
Our teams can get on with what they do best. We can trust them to deliver daily value, free from the tyranny of train or car and wasted time spent in commuter hell.
About the Author
Richard Williams is a fan of business adaptivity in all its many forms. He is a Visiting Fellow in the Industry Faculty at Kingston University Business School and an IC Agile authorised instructor in Leadership, People Development and Adaptive Organization Design. Richard has 25 years of experience working in delivery and product roles for a variety of FinTech and Financial Services companies. He is a transformation coach and SAFe Program Consultant.
