Agile’s insistence on co-location is disabling

Recently my remote company held a few days of in-person social and work events. It was nice to be able to see people, but I wish I had been able to hear people, too. Because I am hearing impaired¹ the switch to remote work during the pandemic has made a huge difference in how I feel about work. It’s a difference that wasn’t really apparent to me until this week of events. That week was the week I discovered the hearing aids I’d been using for three years were totally inadequate for group events.

I mean, I couldn’t hear anyone. This didn’t just limit my participation, though. The experience left me feeling isolated, exhausted, and very self-conscious.

I don’t have this problem with video conferencing. I can carry on conversations, participate in meetings, even run meetings effectively. All critical activities for a Scrum master. But running the meetings in person depends heavily on the acoustics of the space I am in and the willingness of people in the room to project their voice.

The situation has improved somewhat since I bought new hearing aids, but it’s always going to be a problem. The acoustics of conference rooms are often designed to absorb noise, which does me no favors. And trendy office designs often magnify and reflect sounds, which also present very challenging environments for hearing aids.

I think about this often when I read about Return to Office mandates from companies like Amazon, Apple, or Zoom. But other Scrum practitioners also bemoan our now-remote lifestyle. “Things were so much better in person,” they say. Not for me, they’re not. In fact, not for a lot of people, and not just for those of us who have trouble with our ears.

But it’s hard getting around the fact that co-location is a part of capital-A Agile orthodoxy. My CSM instructor emphasized many times that a scrum team was both “cross-functional” and “co-located.” When I suggested that video conferencing tools like Zoom had made it really easy to get many of the benefits of co-location without actually requiring everyone to be in the same office, he became visibly upset.

“It’s not the same thing,” he insisted, making the arguments we’ve all become familiar with from corporate Return-to-Office initiatives: better communication, better collaboration, an increase in “synchronicity,” and improved transparency and observability.

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) even insists on everyone working in the same office space:

Each team is co-located in the same room. This might sound unreasonable. Wouldn’t you, in today’s globalized world, want to use the best skilled people in the place where they are? No. We want the best teams that can take a shared responsibility for the outcome of the Team, and learns from each other. Shared responsibility requires trust. Humans build up trust quickest by close cooperation and face-to-face communication. Co-location also promotes team learning—the essence of continuous improvement.

LeSS Teams

All humans? Or just certain ones? And even if this were true, is it true all the time? Do we need to be face-to-face all the time? Why isn’t video-conferencing face-to-face? What makes you think people have to be physically close to collaborate closely?

These are the questions any Agile practitioner needs to have good answers for before they insist everyone working together in one big room is the best way to go, because open offices exclude many people by default.

Are our office spaces really accessible?

One of the last offices I worked in before going fully remote had a split-level design. A short staircase separated the work space from the common areas. There was an elevator that could be used between floors, but it was slow. Using it required entering and exiting a stairwell through two heavy, non-automatic fire doors.

Most of us could jog down these handfuls of steps without thinking about it. But when my colleague was recovering from knee surgery, every visit to the restroom, main conference room, or kitchen became an elaborate dance with crutches.

Then, the elevator was out of service for several days…

“Old buildings have a lot of problems,” you might be thinking.  But this office space was new construction, and we were the first tenants.

Buildings are not often designed with accessibility in mind. Federal requirements improve this somewhat, but those boil down mostly to a list of checkboxes, with little thought given about the interplay between elements or the complete user experience of any particular space.

Small and large organizations alike continue to manufacture new accessibility problems in the physical space. For example, in 2017 Virginia Tech built a staircase up a short hill but did not include a ramp, forcing people who can’t use stairs to use a much longer, circuitous route:

Ashley Shew, a professor of science and technology in society at Tech and co-founder of the caucus, said there are several problems with getting around the campus. When she has to teach classes anywhere but the Upper Quad, there are challenges to getting up and down the hill that take her on winding paths around buildings. “If I get tenure, I’ll spend decades walking around every building on this campus,” said Shew, who is an amputee and has hearing loss. “You feel like a second class citizen when you have to take the long way.”

‘Sit out’ at Tech opposes set of stairs

A spokesperson for Virginia Tech defended the choice in a way that was both patronizing and dismissive:

“We are not in Kansas,” [Mark] Owczarski said. “This is not a flat place.”

Again, the staircase was new construction. And it should not have come as a surprise to any construction planner that Blacksburg is not flat or that some people struggle with stairs.

Designing for disabilities is hard, especially since there are a lot of different ways people can be disabled. One example that demonstrates how many things we take for granted actually present a barrier for common disabilities is the design of Gallaudet University in Washington DC. Gallaudet is a school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, so the physical spaces are quite different from the typical space. There are sliding doors so that people communicating with sign language don’t have to stop their conversation to walk through a door. Hallways are broad so people signing can stand further apart and read each others sign language. Corners in the hallways are round, not sharp, because deaf people cannot hear someone coming from the other direction. Round corners mean you can see someone before you smack into them. (99% Invisible: DeafSpace)

Most office buildings don’t take accessibility to this extreme, of course, but even if the building has typical accommodations, the office layout doesn’t. Open offices of the kind advocated by LeSS are especially bad. Often the spaces are cramped, which means there’s not much room for people to navigate with a wheelchair, cane, or other support devices. Hip, trendy office spaces that either are or look like converted industrial space with lots of concrete and exposed pipes create horrible, echoing environments bad for both the hard-of-hearing and people with noise sensitivities.

The hustle and bustle of those open spaces also present obstacles to neurodiverse people. Since these spaces are designed to be noisy and push people together into spontaneous conversations, you could argue neurodiversity is excluded by design.

Disabled people vs. disabling situations

The traditional way to think about disability is that there are normal people, and then there are people who are physically or mentally lacking in some way that makes it impossible for them to do things “normal” things. Joan is disabled because she cannot walk. I am disabled because I cannot hear without assistance.

A different way of looking at disability is sociological and circumstantial. That is, spaces and processes create disability when they are designed for a narrow band of capabilities. Joan, who relies on a wheelchair, is not disabled until the elevator is out of service. As I write this, I am not disabled because I don’t need to hear anything.

You can get a sense of how this works if you wear glasses or contact lenses. If you could not wear them, how well could you operate? Drive? Read your email? Decipher someone’s scrawl on a whiteboard?

Most people wear either contact lenses or glasses, at least sometimes. This was not the case for much of history, and not just because lenses were hard to come by or expensive. If you have simple vision problems or a weak single-vision lens prescription, chances are you wouldn’t even notice you were vision impaired three hundred years ago. But now most of our society is organized in a way that requires precision vision at any distance. It’s not so much “your bad eyes” as it is “we have to read a lot of shit.”

As far as hearing is concerned, I am not disabled when I am working remotely because I have multiple strategies for coping, just like people who wear glasses have a means of coping with bad eyesight. I also have hearing aids, but they are also breathtakingly expensive at least in the United States. I have the financial value of a Macbook Pro in each ear… and not the baseline models, either.

Even so, the hearing aids do not restore normal hearing and I have to spend a fair amount of time with an iPhone app that works a little like a primitive mixing board to tune the hearing aids to different listening situations.

When I am in an office space I cannot generally hear the surrounding people. Since I ask people to repeat themselves often, or misunderstand things people say, some people assume I am stupid.

I often don’t respond when someone out of my eyeline asks me a question, and if people don’t know I have bad hearing that’s easily misconstrued as unfriendliness. Even if I tell people directly they often don’t understand that I mean it. (“I didn’t realize you really were deaf,” a colleague told me once. “I thought you were just stuck up.”)

I can do my job in a well-designed, traditional office. Even with top-line hearing aids, I have a lot of trouble in an open office space. It is not that I am incapable, it is that open office spaces are designed for a narrow band of human capability.

Too narrow, perhaps, because open offices work for almost no one.

Open offices don’t do what they claim to do

There’s a growing body of evidence that open offices actually lead to worse outcomes. The claimed² value of open offices is that they increase conversations, but they have so many distractions people have become adept at avoiding those.

Even in open spaces with colleagues in close proximity, people who want to eschew interactions have an amazing capacity to do so. They avoid eye contact, discover an immediate need to use the bathroom or take a walk, or become so engrossed in their tasks that they are selectively deaf (perhaps with the help of headphones). Ironically, the proliferation of ways to interact makes it easier not to respond: For example, workers can simply ignore a digital message.

The Truth About Open Offices, Harvard Business Review

Imagine being so committed to constant communication that employees being “engrossed in their tasks” is a bad thing.

Left to their own devices, developers will often choose to work individually for solid stretches of time. For me, the attraction of programming is how easily I can become engrossed. This opportunity to enter a state of mind Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” and Cal Newport calls “deep work,” but open offices and agile practices prioritize constant availability and communication, which work directly against flow. This even extends to tools like email and group chats.

That CSM instructor I mentioned earlier was very opposed asynchronous communication. If you have a question you need an answer to, he explained, you should go talk to that person immediately. If you couldn’t see them in person, then you should pick up the phone and call. As a Scrum master, he said, I should encourage developers to do this — and if they didn’t, immediately walk them to that person’s space or pick up the phone. “The best way to communicate is face-to-face” is Scrum orthodoxy, but is it really?

Even if you do pick up the phone or walk down the hall, you often still end up leaving a message. If our target is away from their desk, or in a meeting, there’s not much else you can do. If you do manage to catch them, however, it’s no doubt you are an interruption. You’ve placed yourself and your priorities above whatever it is the target is doing at the time. Sometimes that’s warranted, but often it really isn’t.

This insistence on getting answers immediately is strange for a project execution framework that tightly controls when new work can enter the workstream and what the team’s attention is supposed to be on. The “best way to communicate” should take into account the needs of the person you are talking to as well, and sometimes that need is waiting a moment. This “focus for me but not for thee” attitude is a part of Scrum I’ve actively discouraged in my own practice. More often than not, asynchronous communication is just fine.

Of course, the whole theory of co-location is that you are immediately available to anyone walking by, as well as (presumably) alert to all conversations happening around you. This attitude is hostile to concentration, whether you’re neurodivergent or not.

Most people in an office are fighting distraction most of the day because the space is designed to maximize availability at the expense of concentration. These workspaces require a super-human capability to regain lost focus, tolerate intentional interruption, and resist distraction.

I do not argue that ADHD is entirely sociologically constructed. But these highly distracting environments disable many people and induce a state of mind similar to the experience of ADHD. Often, these folks assume their inability to work is a personal failing rather than an entirely predictable consequence — if not actually the purposeful result — of the designed space. If you are unable to concentrate, most of the work you do will be shallow, uncreative, and slow — because of, not despite, all the busyness that surrounds you.

Did we misunderstand the value of synchronicity at work?

In Deep Work, Cal Newport describes the office spaces where concentration and synchronicity were both supported as following a “hub and spoke” design. The spokes are areas of quiet, small (even sound-proofed!) individual or small-group offices. The hubs large common areas — hallways, lounges, cafeterias — where people from different disciplines would naturally be mixed together. The open office which is all hub, with occasional small focus rooms or work pods for people to go on the off-chance they need to think about something.

The important detail here is that these hub-and-spoke workplace designs are multimodal. They start from the assumption that people need focus in order to work, but encourage mixing in the spaces between. Open offices assume that the bulk of the work gets done in the common area with private spaces are limited to occasional use. That is, assuming they are available at all. It is a unimodal approach to work, and everyone is expected to perform in the same environment, working the same way.

Fully remote work combined with regular and easily-accessible video-conferencing mimics much of the hub-and-spoke workspace design. In some cases ways it works even better. Video conferences can handle arbitrarily small or large groups of participants without any conference room conflicts. For those of us with other needs — with ADHD, anxiety disorders, hearing or vision loss, or mobility issues — we are more free to create the kinds of workspaces we need without impinging on other people’s work styles or space.

What the hub-and-spoke or fully remote office designs are incapable of reproducing is the performance of busyness which many mistake for work. A manager of an open work space can see and hear whether people are at their desks coding, or standing at white boards collaborating. This is much more difficult if people have individual offices, cubical, or work from home. Managers must instead rely on the quality of the work product, which is an uncomfortable position for managers who are time-and-efficiency focused or assume their subordinates will slack off if not supervised.

Scrum actively discourages measuring busyness and insists the work product is the only true measure of effectiveness. It is a common failure mode of Scrum. Why, then, prioritize working in an environment that has such negative impacts on productivity and encourages the performance and measurement of busyness?

Perhaps the greatest evidence that open offices fail workers is that workers have been resisting return-to-office mandates created by C-suite executives that would never allow themselves to be chained to their desk.

The new world of work has no time for technological holdouts and leaders who let the digital transformation pass them by now grapple with the realities of being out of touch. “The reason they want to have people back in the office is ‘fill in the blank,’ but usually it’s about how they feel like they don’t have their finger on the pulse of the organization,” says Slack SVP Brian Elliott. The Truth About Return to Office Resistance and How Top Companies Bridge the Disconnect

In fact, RTO policies so often drive people away that companies have deployed them as an alternative to layoffs. The folks most likely to leave are the senior employees and high performers, which are also (coincidentally?) the ones who are most likely to be expensive troublemakers. Employees who quit don’t get severance. When you get to the point where you are forcing people into poor working conditions because you want a third of them gone it’s hard to take any of the arguments about the supremacy of the open office seriously.

So how should teams work, then?

There’s a lot of emphasis in Scrum on having self-organizing teams. We usually parse this as to the teams figuring out on their own how to balance, organize, and analyze work. But I can think of no more important part of self-organization than also letting the team decide where they work. Perhaps it is in the same room. Maybe it is remote. Maybe some team members like to sit together in a small office while others feel more comfortable and effective when they can control the surrounding activity. Almost by definition, agile teams should not be funneled into a single mode of working.

We should also remember that our office spaces are often hostile to neurodivergent and disabled people in ways that are not immediately obvious. Companies and managers need to be sensitive to these problems.

If you do require everyone to be in the office, look around. Does your floorplan automatically exclude anyone in a wheelchair? Do you have amplification in large conference rooms? If so, are people skilled enough to use it and do they use it consistently? Are there sufficient quiet spaces for people who need quiet to work?

Workplaces that claim they are committed to diversity and insist they are trying to provide the best workspace possible need to take into account not only the needs of the workforce they have at the moment, but also the needs of employees they have yet to hire. And these workspaces need to support employee productivity — which might require different strategies for different employees in different situations. Workplaces that look busy but keep employees distracted don’t support careful thought, concentration, or deep work. They are frustrating, disabling, and hostile to most human beings — which is why Return to Office is deployed as a back-door layoff.

Agile practitioners, for their part, need to recognize that open workspaces and co-location often work against the goal of a highly productive team working at a sustainable pace. This kind of work can and does happen remotely, sometimes more effectively than it did in person. And working from home offers opportunities to a much more diverse workforce comprised of people who might otherwise be entirely excluded from the traditional office space.

Footnotes

1. Some people object to the phrase “hearing impaired” and prefer the alternative phrasing “hard-of-hearing.” The National Association for the Deaf says “hearing impaired” suggests that the person is incomplete or broken, while “hard-of-hearing” does not. For my part, I can’t see a dime’s worth of difference between the two. ↩

2. Another advantage of open offices is that they improve surveillance of employees, making it easy to see who is present and busy. This is not usually the advertised purpose, but many people suspect it’s one of the real reasons the C-Suite pushes Return to Office mandates. Spotify acknowledged this recently when they reaffirmed a commitment to remote work, saying “our employees are not children.” ↩