Hi @Ingrid
Your challenges sound familiar and interesting, thanks for sharing them. I researched some other information we have, and I hope I can help you a little bit. Several tools can help with strong communication/collaboration in a hybrid agile setup.
During meetings communication should be aligned.
A „remote-first“ mindset has helped some of our teams. Even if some of them are at the office sometimes, they structure the sprint planning and daily (stand up) meetings remotely. They say that this takes care of possible talking among the on-site people which can be annoying!
They use online visual collaboration tools. draw.io white boards, Miro or Jira Advanced Roadmaps in some teams. Planning becomes more engaging. The virtual workspace for brainstorming or task planning helps.
What about using Google Meets features. We at Seibert do that (and a lot!). You mentioned Google Workspace. Do you use breakout rooms for some discussions? Collaborative Google Docs when you are in the meeting?
Spontaneous Collaboration is great too.
We use Google Chat Spaces for certain “hallway conversations”. Those are great for new ideas and solutions to some stuff. Team members can jump into those rooms at any time and discuss things without much planning of a formal meeting, for example.
Virtual coffee breaks or something like an “end of sprint retrospective” could also be
informal and great for bonding of the team.
Bring In-Office and Remote closer together with tech
High quality tech for the hybrid meetings is very important. I mean high quality cameras
and micros, good screens to make the remote participants part of it all!
Use those virtual whiteboards like drawio whitheboards or Google Jamboard. We use Google
Drive for document sharing all the time! Everyone can access the same documents and
resources, no matter where they are!
We also found that it’s great to have different meeting facilitators all the time. Everybody
is different, and so it’s not always the physically present ones. Remote participants can
be the facilitator as well and well!
Tools like Google Forms or Confluence for agile practices
Input from team members can be gathered easily and show whats working and what is not going so well.
Daily stand ups can also be asynchronous sometimes, we found. If your team is global and has different working hours, we use a shared Google Sheet sometimes. So the stand up meeting does not always have to be “live’!
Make sure everybody knows when a task is done, so there are no misunderstandings across the team.
Our favorite tools:
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Jira for sprint planning (and tracking) or course.
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Confluence for documentation and also for asynchronous collaboration.
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Google Workspace: Google Calendar for schedules of team members, Meet for the video calls, Drive, as said above, for real-time collaboration.
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Google Chat for quick communication and for team “culture”.
And: as you are not new to an agile environment, the transition should be like an experiment! You should iterate and inspect! Retrospectives should be your best friend for a hybrid approach. Team members should have a safe space to discuss what is working ok and what needs to be improved.
I hope that these tips will help a little bit!
You will also and always find great info on subjects like agile and hybrid on our blog!