Recently I caught up with a colleague from work-lives past, a phenomenal strategist and leader in her field. We celebrated her soon-to-be new role heading an organization which previously worked 100% in the office, shifted to 100% remote for about two years, and which is now navigating a new way forward. Sound familiar?

As we were leaving the neighbourhood corner café she sincerely asked, “What do we do?” i.e., What is the right answer: Stay remote? Require people to come into the office daily? A mix of both? … What should that mix look like?

Leaders across the world share her desire for the right answer. The anxiety is palpable; companies and leaders are fearful of getting it wrong.

For the next several years innumerable experts will publish their versions of the “right answers” –  often packaged in memorable alliterative frameworks. Some of these, more so than others, will be valuable; some more lasting than the rest. Inevitably, we will discard most current “best practices” as our companies, teams, and selves evolve. 

Instead of a right answer, I offered her two rituals from agile software development that teams, regardless of industry, can modify and use when sussing out their own answers.

1. Ways of working conversations & team agreements

Using these structured discussions, we make the implicit explicit about how we can best work together and come to a shared understanding of our standard practices. Innumerable resources are available online to guide teams through these conversations, such as Sumeet Moghe’s Inclusive Teams workshop template in Mural.

The most effective of these conversations move beyond uncovering individual team members’ preferences; they are grounded in the genuine desire to understand each other and the willingness by all to give new communication and meeting practices “a go.”  The output will include the answers to the following:

• For what purposes will we use email? Slack? Google chat? Text? 

• What are the expectations about the speed at which we reply to each other on these channels - are we using them as asynchronous or real-time communication tools? 

• For what purposes are real-time meetings required? At what cadence? What are our expectations about how meetings are run?

• How and where do we share information and decisions made, and provide visibility into our progress?

• What will we do to build connection and trust whether in person, remote, or a mix?

For team members to buy into the choices made, they need not love each agreement, but they must understand the why behind them: How are these choices intended to: 

1. improve our ability to achieve our shared goals and 

2. improve the quality of our work lives.

Live with the agreements and learn from the experience by conducting retrospectives.

2. Retrospectives

These structured team discussions are scheduled regularly to walk though what’s working well, what can be improved upon, and – given these – what changes the team will make moving forward. Retrospectives can be straight forward or more creative and integrate evaluative reflection into our team’s workflow.  We needn’t run them in-person and can even run them asynchronously. When led well, with active participation, this simple, yet deliberate practice allows us to improve upon our ways of working together, whether we are co-located or distributed.

Pause. Breathe. Lean into the discomfort with curiosity and compassion. Then, step forward knowing that you’ll get some of it right, much of it wrong, and that nothing is set in stone. As my colleague Eugene Kim reminds me, “Hold it lightly.” 

With attention and intention you and your team can co-create a way of working that works. We aren’t going to know the right answer right away. Let’s start with thoughtfully choosing an answer, live with it, learn, revisit, revise. Live with it, learn, revisit, revise…