Show notes
Five years post-COVID, are we any closer to knowing what kind of work environment actually works best? Brian and Lance dig into the real drivers behind return-to-office mandates, remote productivity myths, and why "context beats location" every time. Overview The return-to-office debate isn’t over—it’s evolving. In this episode, Brian Milner welcomes back frequent guest and fellow Agile coach Lance Dacy for a wide-ranging conversation about remote work, in-office mandates, and the big question: what actually boosts team performance? Together, they explore what we’ve learned (and what we haven’t) in the five years since COVID reshaped the way we work. With studies offering conflicting conclusions and executives often leading with personal preference, Brian and Lance unpack how leaders can navigate decisions that impact morale, productivity, and long-term value delivery. From context-driven collaboration to psychological safety, this is a nuanced take on one of Agile’s most pressing modern challenges. References and resources mentioned in the show: Lance DacyExcerpt from A Leader's Guide to Agile eBookScrum, Remote Teams, & Success: Five Ways to Have All Three by Brian Milner#61: The Complex Factors in The Office Vs. Remote Debate with Scott DunnUsing a Task Board with One Remote Team MemberSubscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Lance Dacy is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®. Lance brings a great personality and servant's heart to his workshops. He loves seeing people walk away with tangible and practical things they can do with their teams straight away. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00)Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back. Thank you for bearing with us for a little bit of a break there. If you notice, we have not been releasing episodes the past few weeks because we've been practicing sustainable pace, but we are back and we are ready to dive into some really, really gritty topics, some things that we think will be really beneficial. Who better to kick us back off to bring us back around than a friend of the show, Lance Dacey, who is with us today. Welcome in, Lance. Lance Dacy (00:25)Right now. Thank you, Brian. How was Hawaii, that big sabbatical y'all took in July? Brian Milner (00:34)Yeah, Hawaii is always great, right? Hawaii is awesome. Absolutely. Isn't that what everyone did in July? ⁓ Well, we're glad to be back and we're excited about what we're going to talk about today because we figured why start with something that was not controversial? Why not find something very controversial? Lance Dacy (00:36)My tie's on the beach. That's where you over. I mean, I didn't see y'all there, but yeah. Brian Milner (00:58)and just set ourselves up to receive lots of disgruntled emails that we're probably going to get this wrong. We're probably going to get awesome feedback too. But I'll just go ahead and start by saying, hey, we hope you give us a little grace on this topic. We're just talking from our experience, our opinions. And I know there's lots of opinions on this, but we wanted to focus on the fact that Lance Dacy (01:06)No, awesome feedback, Brian. Awesome feedback. We're going to get awesome feedback. Brian Milner (01:25)Hey, we're five years removed from the COVID outbreak. And when COVID happened, that was a massive disruption in work. We all had to learn how to do work in a different way, but five years in, what have we learned? What's changed? And now we're seeing lots of things like return to office mandates and hybrid working agreements. You must be here for this many days a week or other things. Lance Dacy (01:44)and Brian Milner (01:50)or companies that say, no, we're now fully remote and we're doing things this way. But I saw this kind really interesting question that made me think about this. If you were designing the workplace from scratch today, would anyone build cubicles? And I thought, well, that's a really interesting question. So Lance, what do you think we've learned in the last five years? Where do think we are today with this whole work from home versus return to office? Lance Dacy (02:16)I tell you what, Brian, I sit there and think, man, five years is a long time to have empirical data. And I don't believe we have data. Let me say it this way. We got the data. What does it mean? You know, so and I'm a data guy. You all know that. And I'm sitting there trying to look at it going, I don't know how much we've learned. think what we've learned is there's no right answer. Brian Milner (02:22)Yeah. Yeah. Lance Dacy (02:39)And everybody's, especially organizations, we're looking for the right answer. Just give me the answer and let's go for it. You and I, coach and consult and people hire us to tell them sometimes what they need to do. And sometimes we're like, no, we're not going to tell you what to do. We're going to learn what the issues are. And then based on that, what should we go from? And I find, you know, if I had to sum up what we've learned, remote can be great, right? Office can be great. neither is a silver bullet. That's what I want. So I'm going to go back to my coaching stance and say, well, let's define the outcome, measure with a multi-focus, multi-factor, multi-dimensional metrics of what we're trying to actually accomplish with our people, experiment, and then keep an eye on the team health. I still feel like that's what we're doing. Five years sounds ridiculous that we haven't figured that out. But I think it was so disruptive that five years isn't enough. And I think the work on top of that is changing so radically. have too many variables up in the air. So for now, if I had to make a decision, I lean toward co-location. When the work is ambiguous, when relationships are important or new, that's another one. If we've got a lot of new people together, working remote is going to be a very difficult thing for a while. So, you know, I'd say, hey, if I'm starting a company and the work is ambiguous, you know, kind like a software product company, the work we're not quite sure what we're doing and needs a lot of collaboration and and a lot of hands on, you know, trust with each other, then I'm probably going to say, let's let's be in the same area sometime. You know, I'm not saying every single day, but. That's how I'm gonna lean towards. And then I'm gonna say if your work is predictable, repeatable, doesn't require a lot of that, and you need intense focus, well then maybe remote is fine for you. So how's that for an answer? I don't know. Brian Milner (04:32)No, think that's a look. I don't think there's ever I don't think you're ever worse off by by being able to admit that right to just say, you know what? I don't know. And I think sometimes that's part of the problem with the way that we approach certain issues is that people are reluctant to say that right. They're reluctant to just admit, you know what? I don't really know. I don't really have the answer on this yet. And I think you're hitting on something that's really important is that there is Lance Dacy (04:39)Right. Brian Milner (04:59)You said no silver bullet. I also think there's no one right answer. I don't think that there is a right answer to this question of should you be in the office or should you be remote? think, right. Lance Dacy (05:12)confidence interval, right? I mean, it's like, there's no, it's not it's not binary. So I agree with you. Brian Milner (05:16)Right. Yeah, there are certain industries, certain products, certain job types that I think are better in the office. And there are others that I think are better remote. And I think what you got to do, and I think I love your return to kind of a coaching stance and looking at this. What's the goal? And I think that's what you have to try to distill it down to is what's the purpose? What's the goal we're trying to reach here? If it's productivity, then let's talk about productivity. If it's morale, if it's enhancing communication, it starts from there. Define what it is that we want as our end goal, and then we can start to find data. We can start to find empirical evidence that either supports or detracts from whatever hypothesis we think we have about this. And that should be what leads us. Lance Dacy (06:10)And it could change, you know, that's the other problem. One quarter, it may be better the stuff we're working on. We're in the office more often. The next quarter, maybe we agree too much. Now, the problem is you go survey people. Let's talk about productivity. You ask, let's say a programmer. Okay, I'm just going to say garden variety programmer, highly skilled. You ask them where they are most productive and most of them, I'm not going to indict everybody, most of them will say, Brian Milner (06:22)Yep. Yes, let's do it. Lance Dacy (06:39)I want to be left alone, no meanings, in silence, coding on my keyboard. They may be going a direction completely opposite of where we need to go, and we won't know that until they come together. And so the other problem with this is we're asking sometimes the wrong question with the wrong people. You ask a single programmer where they're more productive. It's sitting in my office being able to go get a coffee when I want, not sitting in traffic. Hey, I'm all for that. Who's productive in traffic other than, I'm listening to books, you know, so I am growing myself. But nobody, I'd be hard pressed to find anybody saying I love sitting in traffic. So let's put that to the side. Nobody wants to drive two hours a day to their office and back home. That's terrible. But if you ask a programmer that, would you concur that most of them would say, I'm most productive, just leave me alone. Let me write all the code I want. Brian Milner (07:16)You Lance Dacy (07:30)What do you think of that? So now that's the wrong question then, because now we're working in an agile type, let's say in an agile context, where we're working in an empirical nature, which says we don't know what we're doing. So the more iterative and incremental feedback, the better we understand, are we on the right path or not? Brian Milner (07:33)I think that's probably true. I think most developers would say that, yeah. Lance Dacy (07:52)And so if I was to say, it more productive to let the individuals be efficient at what they're doing and then come together later to learn that we got a big gap where we were from? Or do we sacrifice individual productivity with a lot of collaboration, which they may term as meetings? I don't like to call them meetings, they're working sessions, right? We had a backlog discussion about this, I believe, you not long ago. Backlog refinement is not a meeting. It's a working session to say, hey, customer needs this. How are we going to do it? You know, and What is it that they need? So I find, I'm debating with people on LinkedIn a lot, I love this, so this is why it's top of mind, is even if the customer knows 100 % of what they want, which let's just say they won't, but if they did, you do not know how to build it. One programmer may, but when you got four programmers, some testers, some database people, architect, all these cross-functional skills, how can you sit in a vacuum and do that? So if your work... requires multiple skills to come together and you're trying to build a done increment by the end of one, two, three or four weeks, having an individual productivity to me could be harmful. you look, I told this guy on LinkedIn that I don't believe productivity is one dimensional. So he referenced a Stanford, let's see, this was in 2023, that he was saying that, you know, the Stanford study showed that people were more productive working at home. Well, it was actually a 10 % decline for call center staff, by the way. So that work is not as collaborative, I would say, maybe. That same study, though, found 35 % lower attrition, higher employee satisfaction, which raised the long run throughput. So while they declined in productivity at home 10%, most executives would go, no, I got to come to the office. We can't have that. But what if I told you, you say 35 % on whatever the number is, attrition and employee satisfaction in the long run, would you rather take that gamble or not? know, Gallup did the same thing. He was referencing a state of workplace and they find, you know, customer loyalty and margin was better for people that were in the office. They may be less productive individually, but the customers saw a better outcome. So what are we measuring, right? So Brian, that's what I look at. with these productivity debates, I'm like, my gosh, what does productivity mean? Are we optimizing for delivery to the customer flow, or are we optimizing for the individual utilization of the people on the teams? And I think executives have to make a choice. And I say executives, because they're the ones who influence heavily, whether we, I'll talk about culture in a second. But I find that, If people steer towards individual productivity, we might be sub-optimizing, right? We know this. mean, we know flow and systems thinking and, you know, all the things that we read in books with lean and inefficiency and cross-functional teams. But what is productivity? I don't know. You have to define that. So that's where I go back. What are you trying to achieve? Individual utilization, work from home. Let's go. You want delivery to your customer? Maybe not. Right. Brian Milner (10:54)So. Right. No, you're making an excellent point. so I'll throw maybe a massive curve ball into this discussion because I would propose that we may not, if we're looking at productivity as whether in an agile organization, we should return to office or not, we may be looking at the complete wrong thing because Productivity, I would propose, and I say this all the time in classes, productivity isn't the answer. What do we hear all the time now about AI and developers is that AI is enhancing productivity. It's allowing them to do more in less time. Well, that's great. Individual, right. But that's a volume. Lance Dacy (11:42)Individual productivity, individual productivity. Brian Milner (11:48)calculation, right? When we talk about productivity, that's usually we're referring to a volume type calculation. But that's, you and I both know very well that the missing gap there is actually the value gap. And so the question i…
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