By now, you’ve probably seen the Wall Street Journal article on happy hour, or seen the various news coverage stories mourning the loss of drinking after work. What caught my eye was a video of a man asking, “Why should I work longer for free?” He has a point. He should not work longer for […]
This is the November 2024 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email.Is your “hybrid” team working? So far, most of my clients say, “No!” Managers think there’s not enough collaboration. Team members discover their meetings don’t work because the office is not sufficiently equipped with the
I just tried to join a virtual conference in a new-to-me distributed meeting product. It’s supposed to be “easy” and “smooth.” Not for me. I stumbled around for 15 minutes and then left, totally unsuccessful. All the participants are supposed to have avatars—but I never understood how to set mine. (I do have a Gravatar.
Susan, a new-to-the-company program manager, could not understand why Product A was so late. The teams used a well-known agile approach. They weren’t working on anything else except for production support. Yet, even though the teams worked hard, not one team could meet any of their deadlines. The teams were unhappy with their progress. They
If you took an agile workshop sometime in the past 15 years, you probably played the “ball game.” That’s where people emulate a Scrum approach, complete with asking the team to do “more.” As described in the link above, it can be a terrific simulation. There are many reasons to use simulations when trying to
Barney, a senior manager, said, “I need everyone to return to the office. I’m okay with what they’re doing, although I miss the buzz of people doing the work. But I don’t know how to build the human connection with them when they’re not here.” I nodded. “You’re always telling me to have empathy with
I wrote about general meeting problems in Recognize the Problems That Prevent Effective Meetings (Collocated, Remote, Hybrid). But “hybrid” teams have much worse meeting problems. During the pandemic, most of us understood how to create nebula team meetings that worked. (Dispersed teams are nebula teams. See How To Understand Your Team Type: Collocated, Satellite, Cluster, Nebula for
Meetings. We all have them. Most of us hate them. When I ask why, here are some of the responses I hear: They take too much time away from our “real work.” It’s too hard to find time to meet. Our calendars are too full. We can’t find a place to meet. If we’re back
Workshop Objective: In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use principles first, to create, support, and improve your successful distributed agile team. Workshop Overview: You’ll learn the eight principles of successful distributed agile teams and how to use them to personalize your team’s success. Learn how to: How the eight principles change the practices. How
Three Tips to Support Your Successful Hybrid-Remote Team Now that we’ve proved we can work remotely, I predict some form of remote work is here to stay. However, we won’t see all nebula teams, where everyone is remote from each other. Instead, we’ll have some form of hybrid teams—some people in an office and others