Working at home? These tools you’ll need (1/5)

Six months ago, we had to switch couples to working from home. And then not occasionally, but every day. Most of us are still in this situation. Or are now working in a hybrid form that will probably remain the norm for quite some time. But how do you now combine this online and offline collaboration? Time for an update.

Out together, home together

First this: your employer indicates that you may return to the office. But not at the same time. For each team, one part comes to the office and one part stays at home. And you alternate this. The team then never sits together in full occupation. That doesn’t work. I will give you some principles that will give you something to hold on to:

If 1 person works remotely, then everybody works remotely. What I want to say is that then you don’t half-heartedly try to involve that one remote person, but you all use the online tools at your disposal. No physical meetings, but video calls. No post-it notes, but an online Agile board.
Make as much transparency as possible: what you are working on, what decisions have been made and what the progress is.
Smartly choose asynchronous and synchronous communication. Asynchronous communication when you can and synchronous when you must.
Make room for informal catching up. It is much more difficult and unnatural to have a “coffee machine” conversation remotely. But important, for example, for the psychological safety of the team

Five essential categories

Yes, I am a big fan of physical tools like post-its to collaborate around. The tangible nature and the ability to be around them together, face-to-face, is a huge advantage for me as an Agile Coach. Still, I find digital tools enormously useful and now, of course, all the more so. But what tools do you need now?

According to expert Martijn Vroemen, you need at least four types of digital tools to work well together remotely:

Communications

A good communication tool makes it easy to have focused conversations. Messages are easy to find and file sharing is a breeze. A big plus is if the tool works on any device. These are my preferences:

Slack

Slack uses so-called channels to categorize conversations. Members of a Slack workspace can join channels to follow only the conversations relevant to them. You can easily share documents and other files with each other. What I also find ideal is that Slack offers a lot of integrations. For example, with Trello, Jira and Google Drive. The basic version of Slack is free and basically has everything I need. And it works on any device.

Rocket.Chat

Rocket.Chat is tremendously similar to Slack, but with one big difference: it’s open source and you can host it locally yourself. So if you don’t want your data to go outside your company, this is a big plus. Rocket.Chat works similar to Slack and also offers integrations with other tools, unfortunately not as many as Slack. This also works on any device.

Microsoft Teams

Many of my colleagues use Microsoft Teams, and not just because they are tied to this vendor. Teams is also very similar to Slack and has channels, (video) calls, file sharing, etc. It is also possible to integrate several other tools, although not as much as Slack can. Big advantage is the integration with Office365 and if you have the latter, you already have Teams as well. The basic version is free and does not require an Office365 license. Works on any device.

Whatsapp is ideal for quick exchanges. Nothing beats the convenience and adoption of Whatsapp. But just try having a focused discussion with a larger group. That will either be 5 conversations mixed together, or a proliferation of Whatsapp groups. That’s why I don’t recommend it for serious and intensive collaboration.

Ready and go!

Here you go! Once you’ve found a good tool for each category, you’re all set for successful online collaboration. Now you can focus on the most important work: creating great products and services!

Of course, you are not there yet with just having the right tools at your disposal. You need to make (new) team agreements, develop new routines, ensure psychological safety and, for example, facilitate Scrum events properly.

>>> Continue to article 2 on meeting tools.

Need help with this? We have developed an (online) training that teaches you how to do all this well even remotely. Check out our Coaching Remote Agile Teams training or contact Gert-Jan Danenberg