Agile Working During COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Values and principles of agile working emphasize the benefits of personal communication and open team spaces with members sitting in close proximity. This facilitates customer-oriented results and reduces the risk for failures based on misunderstandings. During the current COVID-19 pandemic, most companies reduced office times and encouraged their employees to work from home in order to protect people from infection. Direct face-to-face communication was replaced by online meetings using video conferencing, chats, and cloud-based collaboration. This significantly changed the way of working. While online-based tools for remote collaboration were familiar to many employees before, others were reluctant to use them in the past. The sudden need to utilize these tools in order to be able to participate in business at all opened such tools for people who would not have used them under normal conditions. In this article, the results of a recent study are presented, in which the impact of the pandemic on agile working is examined. Based on these results, a scenario of the future of agile working in a post COVID-19 world is derived. The study was conducted as an online survey in Germany. More than 170 people working in different job positions and from different branches and companies participated. The study reveals that the pandemic significantly changed the way of working. However, people value digital tools and were able to find methods of effective and efficient collaboration in distant work environments.