If you have never seen a high performance fully co-located Scrum team working together in a shared space (with places to isolate as needed), with sticky notes on a whiteboard to track and manage the work, then you have not lived. Truly amazing things are possible in this kind of situation. People perform at the top of their skillset and with great integrity and humility. People communicate better than any other scenario. Progress is transparent, quality is job one and the customer is the focus of the product. Of course, this does not describe every co-located team, it is entirely possible to have a poorly performing team as well. For the sake of the point I am going to make let’s assume that all things being equal the team is awesome.

That same awesome team can adapt to working remotely, indeed they may work remotely already for part of the time to avoid interruption of their flow or because one or more team members cannot be there in person for a short or longer period of time. So, they may already have team conventions in place to ensure that they can still work together effectively as a team. Regardless, fully remote working over a long period of time can work and does work if you have a great team, however it never works as well as a fully co-located team and that fact I do not think will ever change. If you have a poor performing team, remote working just exacerbates their issues and can seriously degrade their already poor or mediocre performance. This is never recommended if it can be avoided.

In this time of Covid though, working remotely is the only sane and safe thing to do for your workers, so how do you make the most of it? How do you get the best performance out of your teams in this stressful situation? First and foremost, you create high performance teams, you instill the Agile values and principles, the Scrum values, Lean values and you make them real through practice and support of them. You then focus on your Agile practices and hone them over time. You do everything you can to replicate in person environments through video conferencing (with the cameras on!), good collaboration tools and an ethic of direct communication with each other (no email! Limited chat!) rather than some overblown process or tools requirement to simply talk to each other.

You can do it, you can create high performance teams in a remote working scenario, it just takes serious dedication and an ongoing, uncompromising effort to continually improve. There is no downside to this endeavor, you can only get better.