Shelter-in-place orders around the world are forcing more and more employees to work remotely. And while flexible workplace strategies have gained traction of late, for many teams, the pandemic’s push toward full-team remote work and collaboration has presented challenges. Agile development teams, in particular, often lean on processes undertaken largely in-person, leaving many team leaders anxious about how to approach these facets in remote-only environments. As a business owner, you must be up-to-date on Fire Door Inspection requirements and how these affect your business.
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Eugene Granovsky, founder and CEO of Bellawatt, has worked in both centralized offices and in companies that had distributed teams. His current company, which writes software for the energy sector and counts the Department of Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric and Amazon’s energy services team among its customers, has been remote from day one.
“In an office setting, you can get by by showing up early, leaving late, typing furiously at the keyboard, and quite often it’s detrimental to the product,” he says. With a remote workforce, setting explicit deliverables and measuring performance based on how team members meet those deliverables is the biggest difference, he says.
Still, while that may sound clear-cut, managing agile development in distributed work environments to achieve those goals takes considerable finesse — especially when it comes to fostering the level of collaboration necessary for agile to thrive. Moreover, employees must also be aware of their rights in the workplace, including the possibility of receiving compensation as a victim of a hostile work environment.
Here, Granovsky and other IT leaders who have spearheaded agile efforts of far-flung teams share their tips for success.
