Unpopulair opinion: Working online is not a challenge — it improves communication
We’ve all experienced how Covid-19 has forced a lot of teams to collaborate online. Just google ‘working online during Covid-19’ and numerous articles pop up showing you how to tackle this ‘challenge’. But are we correct to say that it is a challenge? What if it’s actually an opportunity? I’d like to show you that online working is an opportunity to enhance team communication. To demonstrate this, let’s zoom in on a project I started to work on during Covid-19.
From September 2020 I joined the EdTech track at The Digital Society School (DSS). Covid-19 had obstructed my plans of continuing my world trip. Having been stuck in Australia for two months, I decided to return home and find a job in design. Hired as a Digital Learning Design trainee, I started working on a team project whereby we would design an Educational Escape Room (EER). As teams at DSS consist of people from different backgrounds, my team included an Indian man, a German woman living in Sweden, and a Brazilian woman living in The Netherlands (and of course myself; Dutch, living in The Netherlands, but having lived in the UK and Germany). What set us apart from the other teams is that we were the only team that always had to communicate online; not all being in the same country.
Dividing our team roles, I was chosen as the scrum master for sprint 1. Being a first time scrum master, I combined previous experience in agile methodology, team values, and rituals to design the planning and team organisation. Instead of seeing our online collaboration as an issue, I realised it gave us the chance to listen more, act on our values, and enhance a focus on well-being. This all started with specifying team values & rituals.
Team Values & Rituals
Our project started without us having knowledge of what we valued individually or within a team. The first step was to reveal crucial elements of the way we(‘d like to) work; such as, productive work hours, communication needs, feedback needs, our struggles, and strengths. Using Miro, we wrote on post-its what we needed for each, so that we could observe where we differed or were similar.
To accompany these values, we also stated what rituals we wanted to incorporate in our planning. These included meditation, individual recognition, celebration of birthdays, and more.
Daily Planning
DSS already set sprint timings in our 20-week programme. To accompany this, I created a task board to keep an eye on the sprint 1 pillars that needed to be delivered, and to make each team member responsible for the completion of one. While this proved useful in giving an overview of all activities, more importantly the task board supported the facilitation of the daily planning.
Each day, we had three check-ins: a morning, afternoon, and end of the day check-in. The times of these check-ins were a compromise between what we valued as our productive work hours (e.g. we differed in wanting to start our day at 9 or 10 o’clock. The compromise was therefore 9:30). Each check-in involved our suggested rituals. These rituals gave a sense of control in terms of routine, but they also served as a method to inspire change in behaviour.
- Morning check-in: Each morning we started with gratitude (ritual) about what went well the day before, a summary of each team members’ tasks, and listing obstacles and needs (values)(such as support from the team).
- Afternoon check-in: In the afternoon, we would check-in to measure our mood and reassess obstacles (values). This also served as a way to show what you had completed (values) in the morning.
- End of the Day check-in: We closed off with listing our tasks for the next day, and a meditation (ritual).
In between the check-ins, we would have work hours where we worked individually or together with a sparring partner.
“Values and rituals we listed in the ‘getting to know’ phase returned in our check-ins. They built habits whereby we not only communicated what we had completed, but listened to others’ mood and needs. Also in the work hours, we adhered to the values of needing individual work time and others needing a partner to create ideas. Rituals enhanced and supported the facilitation of these values”.
As you can see, the values and rituals we listed in the ‘getting to know’ phase returned in our check-ins. They built habits whereby we not only communicated what we had completed, but listened to others’ mood and needs. Also in the work hours, we adhered to the values of needing individual work time and others needing a partner to create ideas. Rituals enhanced and supported the facilitation of these values.
Weekly & Monthly Events
Besides the daily planning, I created weekly and monthly events to further integrate and support our values and rituals. These included:
- Learning sessions, whereby one team member gave an interactive presentation to inspire the others
- Input sessions, whereby feedback from all team members was collected. This functioned to create new rituals or to job craft our team roles.
- Lastly, celebration sessions whereby we closed off the week celebrating our completed tasks.
The Takeaway
By setting in place a planning and organisation that respects values and rituals and uses principles of agile methodology, we allow online team communication to prosper. Check-ins give the opportunity to enhance values, and re-adjust according to personal and work needs. Face to face we might not listen to each other’s needs. However, online we need to put in more effort to connect. Limited face time and less body signals, means you have to listen more to understand. This enhanced effort allows for more active listening, the opportunity to act on important values, and enhance a focus on well-being. By practicing this, we could extend this to the offline environment, by learning to listen more actively. Thus by trying harder, we also have a greater benefit.
“This enhanced effort also allows for more active listening, the opportunity to act on important values, and enhance a focus on well-being”.
A benefit that we might not have foreseen, is that those with a preference for introversion might find it easier to be social online by also being given individual working hours. Enhancing the focus on values, hereby also opened the floor to voice the needs of not only extraverts.
As scrum masters, we can take all our team members into account by listening to their values and finding rituals to accompany this in each sprint accordingly. All we need to remember is to communicate, which is definitely possible- also in online spaces.
Interested to know more about our Educational Escape Room project? You can take a look at our website here.
