At the time I write this blog post, there’s the #covid19 epidemic going on. What this means in practice is that many of you will have changed recently to work with a #Remote team, so we are putting together a set of resources for all of our listeners jumping, head first, into working with #Remote teams.In this post, I’m putting together a few ideas and lessons learned on remote retrospectives, and how to get started in your #Remote work journey.
How to facilitate remote #Retrospeectives
We have an episode with Aino Corry on how to facilitate #Remote retrospectives. When it comes to facilitating a remote retrospective, Aino shares these 4 guidelines:
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get people to participate actively
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get everybody on video (if at all possible)
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pace them forward all the time (e.g. using strict timeboxes)
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use round-robin (or some other technique) to get everybody to talk
In that podcast episode, we also discuss some anti-patterns to be aware of. Listen to Aino shares her experience on hosting #Remote retrospectives.
If you are looking for a tool to facilitate #Remote retrospectives, you may be interested in checking out these tools, which all have a free plan:
- Retrium: a native #Remote Retrospectives tool
- Miro Board, previously known as Realtime board: a #Remote collaboration tool with templates that help with #Remote Retrospectives.
Working with, and facilitating #Remote teams
Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby share their experience with #Remote teams. The research work they did is available on their recently published book, and we go into the key lessons in this Scrum Master Toolbox episode on #Remote teams.
One of the key differences to co-located teams they highlight is how distributed team members need to develop their “affiliation” to each other and form a team even when they are not meeting each other in the corridor.
Mark shares a few ideas, like setting up a #water-cooler channel in your favorite chat application. My self, I love to have coffee sessions with my colleagues. Set up a calendar invite, make everyone optional, prepare a coffee cup and chat with your colleagues.
First things first, team agreements
Whatever you do regarding #Remote retrospectives, don’t forget that your situation has just changed. It is time to set up a working agreement for the team that takes into account the fact that you are now distributed (even if you had one before, the situation has changed).
In this blog post on the Management 3.0 website, Lisette Sutherland from Collaboration Superpowers, shares her own approach, and the benefits from a #Remote team working agreement session. The main takeaway is to divide work into 3 areas:
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Information: What kind of information do you need when working with your team? What needs to be actively shared? What can be passively shared?
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Communication: What kinds of communication do you need to setup now that you are #Remote?
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Collaboration: How do you share progress information and offer/request help when needed?
Remember, the team is as much in a new situation as you are. Help them find their new way of working.
Stay healthy, #stayhome (if you can).
Are you having trouble helping the team working well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at:
Darren, aka the Naked Scrum Master, has been helping teams and organizations be better than they were by exposing dysfunction and helping people to remove obstacles from their path so they can be happier and more fulfilled in their working lives.
Rik is an agile coach, who’s worked during the last years at the Volksbank, the Dutch Railways and ABN AMRO bank. Rik also teaches various agile courses such as Professional Scrum Master, DevOps fundamentals and Leading SAFe.
When Johanna visited Agile 2017, one of the largest Agile conferences that year, she was disappointed that the main advice people were giving on stage was: “don’t do distributed”. She then met Mark and started sharing her experience on how she had been able to make distributed agile work in her consulting work. 
Is the co-owner of Digital Maelstrom, a consultancy specializing in custom software, DevOps, managed cloud services, and information security. He has been doing Scrum Master work for over 10 years. He has worked with fortune 500 companies to companies less than 15 people. He also has been doing software development for 17 years.
Scrum Masters act as consultants. They help, but are not responsible for the outcome of the team. They answer, and most importantly, ask questions to help the team learn, reflect and advance. So, we must understand how to be a good consultant. 
Chad’s first experience with Scrum was in 2005 on a global team responsible for consolidating financial software. After some dark days of death march projects, he left his traditional business analyst and project manager roles behind. He is now consulting organizations as an external change agent and organizational agility advisor.
Heidi is an Agile coach who has been working with remote teams since 1999. She aims to show teams and enterprises the value of a cohesive vision and mission, systems thinking, and self-organizing teams. An active member of the Agile community, she trains and speaks at events and conferences worldwide.