Remote agile: Problems, solutions, and pitfalls to avoid

Riku Reunamäki and Carl F. Fey

Business Horizons, 2023, vol. 66, issue 4, 505-516

Abstract: In response to increasing uncertainty and rapid change, firms are looking to implement new management methods to become more flexible and less hierarchical. One of the most popular of these methods is to be agile, which aims for reactiveness, collaboration, decentralized decision-making, and increased autonomy. However, agile was designed to work best with teams in which members are colocated, whereas during the COVID-19 pandemic—and likely in the post-COVID world—many employees are working remotely at least part of the time. We explore how to adapt agile to remote work, drawing from an in-depth case study of OP Financial Group, the largest bank in Finland. We highlight five problems and solutions to implementing agile in a remote setting and discuss the situations and types of teams in which remote agile will likely work and not work. Our findings provide guidance for companies looking to become agile in today’s new normal.

Keywords: Agile; Autonomy; Remote work; Hybrid work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000768132200129X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bushor:v:66:y:2023:i:4:p:505-516

DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2022.10.003

Access Statistics for this article

Business Horizons is currently edited by C. M. Dalton

More articles in Business Horizons from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().