To commute or not to commute? That is the question.

WFO, hybrid or WFH: What actually works for a scrum team.

When seeking a new opportunity, job seekers typically focus on the prospects, growth and, of course, the pay package of the job in question. However, in the last few years, a new factor has emerged that heavily influences the decision. WFO, Hybrid or WFH.

Thanks (or no thanks!) to the disruption caused by COVID-19, hybrid and WFH are pretty much the norm nowadays. Businesses got creative and employed a variety of office setups to meet their needs during the early days when COVID-19 first struck (i.e. curfews, limited physical contact, the world almost came to a halt). It was not by choice; businesses had to reinvent themselves to keep delivering value to their customers (translate: profit) and to survive the onslaught COVID-19 brought. As a result, some companies adopted the hybrid approach, where employees are expected to be in the office for a few days a week and work-from-home (WFH) the rest of the time. Some companies went fully WFH, with no physical premises to attend at all. For businesses that required physical presence (i.e. manufacturing, retail), most continue with full work-from-office (WFO) mode, but only for certain roles.

In a scrum setup, WFH or hybrid creates plenty of new challenges for the team. Most scrum teams are set up with co-location in mind. If you still remember the legendary Agile Manifesto , one of its values states:

Further reinforcing this, you have the 12 principles of Agile Software, one of which says:

Of course, we should note that there is no mention that interaction and face-to-face communication must be physical. To be fair, when the manifesto and principles were first drafted, working in the office was the order of the day. (Hint: just open the Agile Manifesto link above and check out the background image)

I still remember very vividly what it felt like that first day, when the team and I started WFH full time; familiar but awkward. This was during the peak of COVID-19. Most of us hated the idea of WFH. Not surprisingly, given that we had been working from the office for at least a decade or so. Like any scrum team, we had our daily standup; instead of seeing each other face-to-face, we only heard friendly voices through the headset. (Yeah, as you can guess, most chose to switch off their cameras, citing all sorts of reasons, valid or not.) When we set up discussions, instead of the good old whiteboard where we could draw diagrams to get a clearer picture and brainstorm, we ended up explaining ourselves more than coming up with solutions. (Back then, sharing and drawing applications were not great, and they are not much better nowadays.)

It was a learning curve for everyone in the team, from the tools we used daily and the new software-driven ways of communicating, to the nuances and dynamics of human interaction without body language as a visual cue. You also spent considerably less time with your teammates compared with before, and engagement took a hit. However, humans are, as always, highly adaptable to change, given enough time. And we did just that. Everyone embraced the new way of working, the new normal. To top it off, we were still putting out software releases at the same cadence and frequency as pre-COVID, without missing a beat!

When COVID-19 started to normalise into our daily lives a couple of years later, the conversations to transition the workforce physically back to the office began to take place. The rational thinking was that the team would be raring to go. Boy, we couldn't have been more wrong! There was huge resentment towards WFO; most preferred to continue WFH. Yes, these were the very same people who had hated WFH when the idea was first floated to them. The question was, why?

It all boils down to one word: flexibility. Once folks started WFH, they experienced flexibility in a way they had never felt before. For instance, it used to be a daily torment to go through a couple of hours of commuting, mainly stuck in traffic in the city centre or the central business district. If you happened to be a parent, the rush from work to pick up the kids from school, nursery and whatnot was a daily routine. With the rollout of WFH, you not only skip rush-hour traffic; the couple of hours you saved could be channelled into other things, such as sleeping in a bit longer, a relaxed breakfast or lunch, a morning run or even getting the groceries done. Take your pick. To many of us, the new norm was a newfound freedom, yours sincerely included.

In the end, we adopted the hybrid model, with two days WFO and the rest of the week WFH. It was great to be able to work together in the same space again. But a funny thing happened, a lot of folks were so used to WFH that coming into the office felt like a chore. Some would find excuses to skip it. Those who showed up would spend the bare minimum hours before heading home as soon as they could. Why? In the name of flexibility, everything else can be secondary.

There is a renewed push for return to office (RTO). Tech giants such as Amazon, Tesla, Palantir and TikTok, to name a few, have all opted for a mandatory five-day in-office workweek. Google and Microsoft are going for a hybrid model with a three-day in-office workweek. The main justification is that physical interactions (i.e. conversations in the hallway or cafeteria) contribute directly to collaboration and engagement, which in turn lead to faster innovation and speed to market. Executives argue that this simply cannot be achieved effectively over Zoom or Slack. On the other side of the coin lies the conspiracy theory: bosses do not trust their staff, and keeping them on-site is just another form of micromanagement.

So, what is the right model for a scrum team? After years of running teams across every one of these setups, I have come to believe there is no single correct answer. There is, however, a handful of factors that decide it. Here are the ones that matter most.

Nature of the work

Before anything else, ask what kind of work the team actually does. Deep, focused work, such as writing code, designing architecture and debugging, thrives in quiet isolation. Collaborative, ambiguous work, such as kick-off workshops, discovery and design/code reviews, is far faster in person, where you can read the room and build on each other in real time. Match the model to the work, not the other way round.

Scrum team maturity

A newly formed scrum team needs time to synergise its dynamics. Time spent together needs to be optimised, with ample face-to-face interaction and mentorship. This cannot be achieved if we spend most of our time working in isolation (physically, at least). For a mature scrum team, most members already know how to work best with one another, with no more second-guessing.

Onboarding and junior talent

Seniors can stay effective working from home; juniors suffer. Hands-on knowledge, mentorship and simply watching how experienced people think and negotiate work way better in person. If you are scaling a team with fresh graduates, you need more in-person time. If your team is all battle-hardened veterans, WFH is business as usual.

Trust and accountability

The main goal of any scrum team is to build a high level of trust in the team (including its team manager). When there is clear accountability, everyone understands exactly what role they play in the team. If a team member commits to a story and says it will be done by Monday, we trust them, no question about it. When there is accountability, we know stories will get done, whether WFO or WFH. Simple as that.

Team geography

If your scrum team is already spread across three time zones, what exactly are you returning to? A half-empty office and a permanent 9pm video call? A distributed team is already WFH, whether or not there is an office to visit. Once geography is in play, the real question is how synchronised the work is, not attendance.

Consistent rules, high commitment

Everyone in the scrum team must honour the Definition of Done (DoD) and the Way of Working (WoW), no exceptions. If the daily standup starts at 9.00am, then everyone must be present at 9.00am. If every Wednesday is when we have face-to-face iteration planning in the meeting room, then the team will allocate their time to make it happen every week, without fail. In an office setup, you can see who is at their desk and who is missing. In a WFH model, visibility is limited, hence the rules are the only thing we can rely on. A team that honours its DoD and WoW can WFH without dropping the ball. A team that treats the rules as optional will see its deliverables decrease over time. As a result, leadership will opt for WFO as the quick fix, not because the office is the silver bullet, but because it is the fastest way to restore discipline. Honouring the DoD and WoW may sound petty, but it is the very foundation that successful, high-impact teams are built upon.

Let's be frank here, there is no one-size-fits-all, but I have my preference. Hybrid would be my go-to model. Collaborative work (i.e. iteration planning, retrospective, design workshop) would be best done in the office, while home is where the team will thrive doing deep, focused work. Full WFH must be earned by a mature and high-trust team. If you are ramping a new team, the obvious answer is full-time in the office, or at least until you achieve an optimised team velocity.

Whether you go for WFO, hybrid or WFH, the question remains the same: how can you continue to improve in delivering value to the customer? However we slice it, we should not hide behind the facade of flexibility just to get things our way. While I personally think that work/life balance (some call it integration) must be considered, at the end of the day, customers are the ones paying for our livelihood. No doubt, it is a delicate balancing act.