5 tips on coaching agile teams in WFH/Hybrid work conditions

Article by: CompareCamp for uExcelerate

The past year saw a drastic increase in agile adoption among businesses. According to a recent survey, 52% of companies have implemented agile teams within their organization. These are cross-functional groups of individuals with varying expertise and skills wholly dedicated to a particular project. The most common areas in the company that adopted agile principles include software development teams, IT, operations, marketing, and security.

With the rise of hybrid work culture, more businesses are re-evaluating their approach to deliver better and more efficient coaching for their teams. After all, agile teams need an equally flexible and versatile coaching system. This extends not only to its accessibility but also to your coaches, platforms, and methodologies.

 

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Coaching Agile Teams in WFH and Hybrid Work Conditions
• Understanding the Challenges of WFH and Hybrid Work Models
• 5 Essential Tips for Coaching Agile Teams:-
•          1. Prioritize Clear Communication
•          2. Foster a Collaborative Work Environment
•          3. Encourage Adaptability and Flexibility
•          4. Leverage Technology to Enhance Team Efficiency
•          5. Focus on Mental Well-being and Work-Life Balance
• The Role of Agile Coaches in Remote and Hybrid Workplaces
• How to Overcome Common Challenges in Agile Team Coaching
• Conclusion: Building Resilient Agile Teams in the New Normal

 

Here are some tips on coaching agile teams and how you can integrate them into your hybrid team best practices.

1. Invest in the right tools

Implementing a hybrid or remote workplace means investing in various digital tools. This will give your teams the flexibility to work wherever and whenever they need to. Not only that, but these tools could also help you with how to manage a hybrid team. The same goes for coaching agile teams in WFH or hybrid work conditions. Digitize your coaching approach using the right digital tools for your teams.

Nowadays, there are myriad software solutions that your business can use to provide digital coaching. This includes software solutions like learning management systems (LMS), coaching platforms, and communication apps. It is important that you invest in the right tools that cater to your team’s specific needs.

You can do that by considering the following:

• Size of your agile team
• Background of your team members
• Type of project they are working on
• Challenges that they are currently facing
• Preferred method of learning

By knowing your team’s needs, you will have an idea of what tools and features to look out for.

2. Digitize and centralize training materials

To fully embrace digital coaching, it is time that you ditch the papers and go completely digital. This means uploading your training materials into a digital platform to make it more accessible and convenient for your agile teams to access them as needed. By digitizing and centralizing important documents and files, your teams have a reference that they can go back to anytime they need or want to.

You can use document management software systems to store digital training materials such as handbooks, manuals, and course notes. You can also administer exercises and quizzes virtually where your teams can test their new knowledge.

3. Personalize coaching experience

Everyone has their way and pace of learning. Hence, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all type of coaching. This is evident in your agile teams, where the members usually come from different backgrounds and fields. For your coaching to be effective, it must meet the varying demands of your agile team members.

Fortunately, you can personalize coaching experiences to fit the learning styles of your agile team members and provide a wide range of options on how they can access coaching. For one, you can create a multi-platform coaching experience wherein team members can choose whichever device they want to use to access coaching sessions. You can also provide them with synchronous or asynchronous learning experiences to make it easier to fit coaching into their busy schedules.

4. Leverage agile coaching

Adopting a hybrid or remote workplace means adopting a new mindset guiding your teams. You need to understand your members deeper and discover how best to help them grow in an entirely new working condition.

Leveraging agile coaching can help you find the right approach to coach your agile teams as you transition to a hybrid workplace. You can hire an external agile coach or choose an internal employee or head of the department from your organization to coach your agile teams. The important thing to consider is that these coaches excel in agile methodologies and exercises and also have a good understanding and experience in having coaching conversations. The role of agile coaches isn’t just to introduce new procedures into your team but also to ensure that new principles will work well with the entire team.

This makes agile coaching a more flexible coaching approach appropriate for agile teams.

5. Listen to feedback

It’s normal to have setbacks while adjusting to a hybrid or remote workplace. The important thing is that you learn and get back up from these setbacks. This applies to your agile teams’ search for an effective coaching approach.

The best way to do that is to listen to your team’s feedback. This can be in sensing surveys, assessments, and evaluation of their performance after coaching. This allows you to determine how they feel about your current coaching method and whether it helps improve their performance. You can also use this information to know what type of coaching will be more effective for your agile teams.

Creating a culture of coaching in hybrid times

There are many challenges in managing hybrid teams. Coaching them is just one of them. But thanks to the various solutions available for businesses, you can now provide your agile teams the support and training they need while working from home. One such platform that can help you is uExcelerate. It is a leadership development platform that offers on-demand online coaching as a service to organizations while also enabling organizations to scale coaching and build sustainable coaching cultures to foster personalized talent development for their employees.

uExcelerate’s Symphony is an AI-powered SaaS platform designed to enable organizations to scale coaching solutions and build sustainable coaching cultures that foster personalized leadership development for all employees. It can be white labeled by organizations to roll out their internal and external  learning programs, enabling easier monitoring and analytics of the  coaching/ mentoring/ training programs ongoing in the organization. It gives access to various customizable tools which can be used to personalize the journey for the participants. SYMPHONY also enables access to:

• DISCOVER, uExcelerate’s curated external coach marketplace comprising highly specialized and experienced coaches from around the world and empowers coachees to choose their Right-fit coach.
• PACE,  uExcelerate’s coaching programs based on academically sound models and frameworks for individual, group and team coaching.
• and APPRAISE, uExcelerate’s 7C framework thats  helps organizations to assess the maturity of their coaching processes and practices and get actionable insights to build a strong coaching culture to drive performance.

uExcelerate’s Unified leadership development platform can meet the present and future coaching needs of any organization, irrespective of their coaching maturity lifecycle stage. Connect with us today and start your journey to building a strong coaching culture.