A couple of years ago my family and I fulfilled a long time dream and moved to a little village in the Czech Republic. Since I’ve always done at least some of my work remotely, it was not much of a stretch to go “full remote” from my home. Later, when the pandemic hit, I found myself in the vanguard of a much larger wave of tech workers who weren’t coming to the office anymore. Many of them, I suspect, will not want to return even after this is all over.

Working from home is great in many ways, but for agile teams and the people who lead them, it presents some unique challenges. Scrum, in particular, was designed with co-located teams at its heart. The Scrum Guide, for example, specifically talks about the daily scrum as being held “same time and place each day to reduce complexity.” Surely, this is not an option when your team is spread all over the country, the continent, or the world.But at its heart, Scrum is a behavior framework. It is no coincidence that the Scrum Values are behavioral, rather than functional. Commitment, openness, focus, respect, and courage are things we can offer ourselves and each other across any distance and communication medium. When we work remotely, though, we may need to invest some more work to achieve some of these behaviors.

In their fantastic book Mastering Professional Scrum, Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl talk about the five steps of effective team collaboration. They begin, first and foremost, with trust. Trust lets team members approach conflict in a productive way, commit to a common goal, and have accountability to each other.

Trust is also important from a managerial perspective. At one of my previous jobs I managed 15 people, and on any given week at least one of them was working from home. My boss never liked that. I allowed this, but I always felt that you have to treat your teammates as adults and trust them. This idea flew in the face of the top-down, micro-managing culture of the company, but part of the reason they hired me was to bring in agile thinking and methods, so they let me get away with it and it worked. Nevertheless, imagine a company were not just one person, but whole teams work remotely all the time. As a manager, you cannot (and should not) check up on everyone all the time. You have to have trust.

But how do you build trust, especially when you can’t look someone in the eye? Ockerman and Reindl offer a number of techniques in their book. It’s a fantastic resource and I would highly recommend it to any agilist. Here I would like to focus on a couple of these ideas, and how I have had the chance to apply them in a remote setting.

The first idea is “be first” – be the first to show trust, and be willing to be vulnerable as a way of fostering interpersonal communications. I was working for a while with a small group of developers spread across three countries. We would do our daily scrum on a conference call every morning, and because there were only four of us, it usually only took a few minutes to complete. This was fine on a professional level, but it lacked the personal dimension that makes a group of people into a team, and so I started sharing with them bits and pieces of my life after the “official” meeting was done. This had an amazing effect. I actually got to hear my teammates laughing for the first time in months, and eventually they started talking about their lives too. It would only be five minutes at the end of the daily scrum, and we wouldn’t do it every day, but these informal chats after we finished our daily scrum had an amazing effect on how we saw ourselves as a team.

The second idea is “assume positive intent” – Do your best to assume the best about other people’s actions or words. I mentioned before about having to trust your people as a manager, and I’m happy to say that that trust was usually warranted and appreciated. But it did sometimes happen that I felt that a person may not be pulling their weight. When that happened, my response (as a manger) was simple: I would message that person and ask them if they are ok and if they needed any help. IE, instead of calling them into my office and demanding to know why they didn’t do their job (as was common practice where I worked), I assumed that they did the best they could, and if they came short of their commitment to the team thenthe team should rally to their aid. Instead of an otherwise contentious situation where the person gets angry and defensive, I was making that person feel like they are allowed to be imperfect and human, and that that was OK. Often the person would tell me that they’re ok and they intended to work late that day to finish their tasks, which was fine by me. Sometimes it turned out that the person did need help but was afraid to ask for fear of looking stupid or incompetent, and when help was offered without judgment they embraced the opportunity. As it turns out, this technique works even better in a remote setting: Instead of talking in someone’s office or the break room, when you’re telecommunicating you’re already sitting at your desks. It’s much easier to share a screen, or cut and paste something into a chat to share it. And it is often easier for the person on the other side to admit a measure of vulnerability without looking you in the eye and feeling they’re being put on the spot.

There are some techniques in agile facilitation that don’t translate well to  remote settings. But there are many that do, and many companies employ agile practices in remote settings. We just need to be deliberate and know what we are trying to achieve and why.