I’m a strong proponent of hybrid working.

Requiring a strict in-office presence can be hard on many employees with long commutes, family caretakers, or people with physical disabilities. The collaboration needed by Digital Trailblazers, especially ones leading DevOps and agile teams, is rarely achieved by jumping from meeting room to meeting room or expecting people to develop meaningful relationships at the water cooler.

During the pandemic years, DevOps and agile team leaders had to adjust their collaboration practices to support remote work. I’ve previously written about how to conduct remote sprint reviews and retrospectives and other tips for hybrid work for agile and DevOps teams.

Today, Digital Trailblazers must be more strategic about collaboration and decide why, when, and how to organize in-person and hybrid meetings. Executives and leadership groups often do this through workshops and offsite meetings to bring people outside their day-to-day responsibilities and focus on collaboration, problem-solving, and decision-making. Digital Trailblazers, especially DevOps and agile team leaders, should consider workshops as a critical tool to enable hybrid work while empowering team and cross-team collaboration.

Why DevOps and agile team leaders schedule workshops

Am I alone in this belief that in-person meetings and workshops can help Digital Trailblazers accelerate transformation and improve collaboration with DevOps and agile teams? I’m not!

“As with many engineering teams, in particular, many of our engineers are hybrid or fully remote and, with that, comes a separate set of demands, so it’s important to get the balance right on in-person meetings,” says Naggi Asmar, chief engineering officer at Matillion. “Ultimately, hybrid and remote team leaders must be agile and willing to adjust their leadership style to best fit their employees’ needs. Whether developing better communication, improving collaboration, or being more intentional with face-to-face time, businesses must be open to adjusting their approach to accommodate today’s global workforce.”

Here are several reasons to schedule workshops:

1. Channel emotions toward creative collaborations

“In the realm of hybrid work, mere office presence is not the same as meaningful collaboration,” says Marko Anastasov, co-founder of Semaphore CI/CD. “Do gatherings reignite passion, synergy, and innovation?”

In other words, workshops can help teams raise their emotional intelligence (EQ) and drive creativity – two key elements needed to drive innovation, and that’s often less effective when done on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or through the drudgery of in-office meetings.

2. Realign organizations on mission and goals

There are good reasons why sales organizations schedule at least a once-a-year gathering. Digital Trailblazers should also consider yearly offsites, full-team get-togethers, and workshops aiming to align on yearly objectives.

 “To build a great engineering culture, the entire team should get together once a year for at least three days,” says Jim Gochee, CEO at Blameless. Use this time to align on shared goals, to educate and train, and to build connections. I’ve successfully used this approach for over a decade.”

For medium and large enterprises, CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs should consider gathering the entire DevOps and agile team organization to create meaningful self-organizing standards, discuss learning objectives, and review vision statements of digital transformation objectives.

3. Solve problems and improve communications

Grant Fritchey, product advocate at Redgate Software, shared several reasons you might want to schedule workshops and offsites to address common challenges facing DevOps organizations and agile teams.

• When making the initial social shift necessary to DevOps, an offsite helps the team establish a newer, better means of communication.
• If you attempt to move your established processes into new technologies, an offsite where people can focus and brainstorm may also be useful.
• If you suffer a major outage or problem with your process, an offsite as a way to understand what went wrong and how to fix it can benefit from the focused, face-to-face communication that being away from the office can provide.

Plan the workshop: Agenda, attendees, and homework

At a recent Coffee with Digital Trailblazers, a LinkedIn audio event I host on Fridays at 11am ET, we discussed several best practices for organizing offsites and workshops. Executing a meaningful workshop where people walk away with deeper relationships and the group solves key problems requires planning.