2022’s Agile & work trends
Hello and happy new year! A new year is a time to reflect, to look back to the stuff which we did and happened in the past, but also to look forward. What should be the things to keep an eye on, to watch in the workplace which might make or break? Which trends do we see evolving in the coming year?
For this article, I asked the community for help! On the 6th of January, I hosted a community event in The Liberators Network and asked the question: what are 2022’s scrum/agile trends to watch? Based on their answers and my own experience, these are the results!
Covid
Let’s start with the obvious elephant in the room. The covid pandemic has changed many lives forever. Many people have been forced to start working from home and had to quickly adapt to many changing situations. Now the pandemic is in its third year and vaccines are here, I fully expected to not be in a lockdown anymore. But yet, here we are, and here we will be. At least for the time being, we have to deal with measures thrown upon us for our safety and public health.
Besides the remote work, we have to be creative. If you have the ability to go into the office, what are you going to do there? Have online meetings with colleagues who weren’t able to reserve a spot, or have meaningful conversations with those who do? However, many of my participants didn’t see themselves going back into the office anymore, so remote work seems to be here to stay — in some form or another.
Covid and networking
With Covid, many meetups and social activities went online. This significantly lowered the threshold do participate, but hosting an online event is challenging. How do you keep your meetup interesting and interactive, whilst allowing for a low threshold so the technology is not too technically challenging for any participants?
I expect there will always be a market for online meetups, because online events have a far greater reach than in person events where the reach is usually within an hour’s travel time. However, online events need to compete with in person events and that will shrink the market. I expect some heavy competition, so prepare to figure out a unique selling point and audience for your event.
Purpose
Like any life threatening event, a pandemic makes you think about purpose and refocus. Why are you here and why are you on this planet? This goes for companies as a whole, as well as individual employees.
Companies are faced with closures and lockdowns on and off. This asks a lot of their resilience and creativity to work within the rules, but still be able to keep employees happy and productive. Whilst it has been a focus of survival for two years, what does your company look like after the pandemic? Do you care for your employees and allow them to work remote (at least partially) or do you want everyone back into the office as much as possible? What are your company’s goals and values and what makes you ready for the future, which is more digital, but also knows the value of personal interaction and a personal touch?
In order to face the big challenges of the future, companies need to put their best foot forward. Not just drawing in as much money as possible to send to the shareholders, but also have a meaningful and conscious way of working. Think about the way you produce and sell the products, but also how you use the profits to make a difference in the world by supporting the community.
Employees need to (re) find a company to fit their own wishes. If your company revisits their values and purpose, so must you — and decide whether your company is still aligned with you and you stay, or you go. As an example, the popular reddit forum r/antiwork has many people complaining about bad employership and people who quit their job. Take a look around, and maybe the grass is greener somewhere else? Do the changing values of the company you work for fit your changing values?
The frameworks
Whether it’s agile, scrum, XP or lean, the frameworks need a revisit as well. The future will go further than just applying a framework — if there is a framework at all. Values within these frameworks will become far more important and living the values will be the competitive advantage of the future. As is stated in the scrum guide: scrum is simple to implement, but difficult to master. There’s more than just learning about a few events, artefacts and roles — truly living the values is far more important.
I also think this comes with a challenge — values are at the core of a company’s culture. Not visible on the surface but only when taking a deeper dive into the structure. So changing these values will be a big challenge taking the most of the consultants and leadership of organisations. Theories on how to do this emerge — of course, but are very challenging.
Trust
Looking back at these changes and what is left, one word surfaces my mind: trust. The trust a company puts in their employees to do the right thing, even when working from home. Trust of employees to know what is best to do — use the skills and knowledge of the many to feed the organisation from the bottom with new ideas and solutions to challenging problem. Leaders should become facilitators of these new ideas. Trust is also one of the most important values within the scrum framework and when building teams. It starts with trust.
Closure
Every time — every year — has its own challenges. As, slowly but surely, either the dust of the pandemic settles or we learn to live with it, companies need to show how well fit they are for the future. We all started hoping to see the end of this sooner rather than later, but as the crisis is handled and the world wakes up, we learn that “back to normal” is not what is happened. The world has changed forever.
Note that, the above statements are my own or made during the online event of Jan 6th 2022 and not of any of my clients or my employer.
