When you start interacting with someone, you can assume some common ground, and this develops over time as interactions deepen. The more interactions you have with someone, the better the joint context and the more common ground you have. You can assume some common ground before an interaction, but it increases over time with further interactions and deepens the more interactions you have.
Impact on Remote Working: Is it harder for remote teams to achieve common ground when compared to fully colocated teams? Maybe, but if the full team embraces a different mindset, approach, tools and processes, it becomes a close-run comparison.
Feel free to skip the following sections (Context, Interaction, Trust, Common ground and Agile Law) as it musing about why, rather than thoughts on how
All information is meaningless until you provide context. We build up context based on our past experiences, where we have worked, who we socialise with and the situations we have found ourselves in. We know that working for the same organisation allows for some specific shared context. You might share a work environment and culture, and you can draw on this knowledge when interpreting what’s being said. However, we hold specific mental models that, though seemingly closely aligned, often have varied meanings from person to person. A term like DevOps has a wide range of definitions and just because you say the same word it doesn’t automatically imply you share the same meaning. Remember, “my” context is different than yours.
Impact on remote working: Explain yourself clearly. We have all sent an email that has been taken out of context, resulting in someone overreacting. Sometimes a pithy one-liner via Twitter isn’t the best method of communicating what you have in your head. When you are face-to-face, you can wave your hand, draw on whiteboards and see when someone doesn’t understand what you are saying. Draw your ideas using shared interactive boards like Miro or the tool in Zoom. Take the extra time to explain your context, don’t use woolly terms ( /ˈwʊli/ vague or confused in expression or character, ‘woolly thinking’) and don’t assume you are talking about the same thing!
Colocation (of people/teams) is not about physical colocation. It’s about colocation of minds. Physical proximity is a good way to achieve it, but not the only way. There are other ways. The argument of face-to-face communication should not be used against remote working. - Christian Hujer
At Equal Experts, we often work as co-located teams; however, this isn’t always the case. We have seen a variety of arrangements from a single hub location with work-from-home Fridays to multiple hub locations spread across geographies and different time zones to fully distributed teams.
The ideas set out below aim to create conditions that allow for teams to be highly collaborative in a remote setting. They explain how to increase the connection strength between each node to achieve a point where there is clear common ground across the team that isn’t dependent on physical (or temporal) proximity.
From this (remote-friendly)
To this … (remote-first)
There is a real difference between operating as remote-friendly vs. remote-first. Make it clear as a team what you want to be as it impacts the actions you need to take. This playbook focus on the actions required to be remote-first.
: Your company may allow you to work remotely. But, most of your company’s processes, tools, and meetings will revolve around the office. As a result, remote teammates often feel excluded from important meetings and company decisions, even if that’s not the intention.
: Remote-first empowers team members to work remotely, make and decisions online. Individual’s always have their video on, even if the majority of people are in the same room. Tools, ways of working and processes, level the communication playing field providing equal opportunities to contribute ideas and access information.
Source amended from:
Hanlon’s Razor - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by misunderstanding or neglect.
Trust is a multiplier! Teams need to collaborate to deliver a goal, and if basic levels of trust are not present, it leads to fewer interactions and, therefore, even less trust. If you want to build trust in a team, communication is key. With communication, you learn about the personality of your teammates. You can assess their values (and how they fit with yours) and evaluate their capability and expertise.
Impact on Remote Working: Open, prompt and continued interactions allow you to gather evidence about other members’ credibility and trustworthiness. Take the extra effort and time to talk via video and keep constant communication via Slack. If you’ve gone through the whole day and have only spoken to your cat, then maybe you need to communicate with your team a bit more.
Colocation is always better than remote working; it states it in the agile bible somewhere so it must be true.
There is an assumption that colocation is better. After all, in Kent Becks - Extreme Programming Explained the very first Primary Practice he lists is Sit Together.
Develop in an open space big enough for the whole team.
There is surprisingly little scientific evidence on the effectiveness of co-location, which seems to be more assumptions than hard scientific facts. There are a few quality articles. The majority of the literature is based on case studies and anecdotes and shows little in the way of quality evidence. The rise of the new wave of tools, such as Slack and Zoom and more focused working practices aimed at working remote, are not featured in these studies.
As Beck continues in his book he states:
Does the practice of sitting together mean that multisite teams can't do XP? The simple answer is no; teams can be distributed and do XP. Practices are theories, predictions. "Sit Together" predicts that the more face time you have, the more humane and productive the project. If you have a multisite project and everything is going well, keep doing what you're doing. If you have problems, think about ways to sit together more, even if it means travelling."
So the "agile law" isn't so strict. Beck calls out a key reason why sitting together is important;
the more face time you have, the more humane and productive the project
So we should look at the underlying components that go into effective collaborative working and see how technology and working practices can help.
Encounters lead to interactions, which allow communications. How do we increase the frequency of encounters? What factors turn encounters into interactions? How do we convert interactions into communications?
Increasing the physical distance separating people at work is likely to decrease the amount of spontaneous, informal contact among them. There need only be a small amount of distance between people before they stop interacting.
Impact on Remote Working: You need to reduce the friction required to connect to your team. Each slow response to a question is like moving your desk an extra few meters away from your team until eventually, you are in the basement office with the door closed. Using always-on Zoom channels or fast response to Slack messages can increase your teams’ proximity with minimal effort.
NB: Although we use Slack and Zoom as the default messaging and video conference tools, other tools exist that might be as good. We just haven’t found them.
People must have confidence that private conversations are only heard by those intended and not overheard by anyone else. Interactions in the absence of such privacy — talking in a corridor, for example — risk being silenced or broken up by the appearance of others and raise concerns about what the interrupter might have heard.
Impact on Remote Working: If the only time you speak to another team member is on the daily Zoom call with 15 other people, then you will never create the necessary environment for people to have those frank and honest conversations that are required. Consider taking a video call directly, or take conversations to temporary Slack messaging so you can thrash out the details. Just remember, once you have finished, consider sharing the outcome with the rest of the team in a shared channel, so everyone has the context.
The social definition of the space: What is supposed, obliged and allowed to occur there. People have got to feel comfortable that it is okay for them to be in a certain place, that is, not feel embarrassed or discredited. For an encounter to become an informal interaction, the people involved must not only feel comfortable about what others will see and hear — the issue of privacy — but also what others will think.
Impact on Remote Working: In a remote environment, having different channels for people to talk about topics ranging from specific technical subjects to a place just for some watercooler chat helps promote legitimacy between co-workers. Remember that shy people in a remote setting will be doubly shy, so ensure that the team environment invites active communications across all team members.
