Agile Leadership during the Corona Crisis
Leading agile teams remotely during COVID-19 — what changes, what stays the same, and how to keep communication alive when your team is distributed.
The current crisis around Corona brings challenges to all of us. During restrictions in our private life — free time, sports, availability of groceries — we can also see changes in our business lives. One important question is how to perform agile leadership during this crisis.
The producing industry has problems receiving their resources and needs to shut down their plants.
For IT companies, luckily, this crisis is a little bit more mild. They can send their employees to their home office, where most of them already work regularly on Fridays.
But what does it mean for leadership? How do we lead our teams if we cannot see them in person? Can we compensate the reduced probability of communication somehow?
Usually Less Communication in Home Office
Communication with your team in home office mostly means calling them on your cell phone or using a conference solution (MS Teams, Skype, WebEx, ...).
Although this works quite well, the probability that team members talk to each other decreases with increasing distance between them.
Rather than finding that the probability of telephone communication increases with distances, as face-to-face probability decays, our data show a decay in the use of all communication media with distance (following a near field rise).
— Thomas Allen (MIT)
So, to keep your productivity high, keep the following in mind:
- Keep communication frequency high
- Transform your meetings to happen online
- Fight social distancing in your team
If you wonder how to set up your Scrum team remotely, you should follow the actions on REMOTE-SCRUM!
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do you run agile ceremonies in a remote team?+
Remote agile works well when the rhythm is preserved: daily standups via video, sprint planning in shared digital boards, and retrospectives with structured facilitation to compensate for the loss of body language. The ceremonies don't change — the facilitation discipline has to increase.
What changes when an agile team goes fully remote?+
Informal communication disappears, which means blockers stay hidden longer and psychological safety is harder to maintain. Leaders need to increase structured check-ins, make space for non-work conversation, and be more explicit about expectations rather than relying on ambient office visibility.
How do you maintain team cohesion in a remote agile setting?+
Short, frequent, predictable touchpoints matter more than longer meetings. A 15-minute daily standup that reliably happens is more valuable for cohesion than a weekly all-hands. Separating work rituals from emotional check-ins also helps — teams need space for both.