Rebuilding Agile Team Connection in the Remote Work Era | Sara Di Gregorio

Summary

Episode Summary

Podcast: Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast
Episode: Rebuilding Agile Team Connection in the Remote Work Era
Guest: Sara Di Gregorio
Host: Vasco Duarte
Date: November 18, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on rebuilding and maintaining strong team connections in a remote work setting. Vasco Duarte welcomes Agile Coach and Scrum Master Sara Di Gregorio, who shares her real-world experiences facilitating team cohesion, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic’s transition to remote work. Conversations explore the importance of non-violent communication, practical steps for fostering interpersonal bonds, and actionable strategies for Scrum Masters to combat the mechanization of remote team interactions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Power of Nonviolent Communication (NVC)

• Sara’s Book Recommendation:

  • Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, translated in Italian as Words are Windows or They Are Walls.
  • Emphasizes listening without judgment, asking the right questions, and observing to understand real needs.
  • Focuses on building connection over barriers—critical for facilitators and team environments.
  • Sara:

    "The book helped me to shift from reacting to connecting, which completely changed the quality of conversation." (03:35)

• Practical Application:

  • Sara describes her journey from giving quick, reactive answers to embracing patience and reflection for more meaningful communication.
  • For Scrum Masters, these skills are essential when facilitating, mediating, and promoting open dialogue in meetings.

• Vasco’s Reflection:

  • NVC is about helping teams help each other, especially during conflict.
  • Vasco:

    "In the end, we're helping them to help each other go through even difficult situations." (05:08)

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2. Team Connection Challenges in Remote Work

• Emergence of Disconnection:

  • Fully remote environments, especially during the pandemic, often led to the loss of spontaneous, real “human” connections.
  • Sara observed that standard in-person meeting protocols did not transfer well to remote settings.

• Adapting Communication Practices:

  • Sara initiated five-minute personal check-ins at the start of meetings—asking, “How are you today? What happened yesterday?” (08:20)
  • Regular team “coffee breaks”—virtual, non-work chats to replicate coffee machine conversations.
    • Initial team resistance ("But I have a meeting…") yielded over time to cultural adoption.

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3. Recreating Informal Interactions & Feedback Loops

• Structured “Unstructured” Time:

  • Instituted fixed “coffee” meetings, up to three times a week, for 10 minutes, usually after lunch or prior to daily standups.
  • End-of-week feedback sessions:
    • 30-minute Friday recaps, both one-on-one and team-wide, for open reflection and improvement discussion.
    • Sara:

      "It was for me, a way to recollect all the coffee machine communication that we were losing…30 minutes on Friday to say, okay, recap of the week." (10:47)

• Results of these Practices:

  • Helped restore lost touch points among team members.
  • Made space for feedback and informal sharing that would have otherwise disappeared in a purely remote format.

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4. Practical Tips for Scrum Masters

• Fixing Human-Centric Time in the Calendar:

  • Make soft-starts or social moments recurring, e.g., Friday morning “coffee” before daily Scrum or agenda-driven meetings.
  • Sara:

    "It was very important to have this fixed moment in the morning in the agenda. It worked very well for me." (13:29)

• Build Social Capital:

  • Teams need people-to-people experiences, not just action lists.
  • Scrum Masters can design spaces to nurture trust, social capital, and informal interaction, which “mechanized” meetings cannot replicate.

• Vasco’s Summary Thought:

  • Scrum Masters create environments where social bonds thrive, making teams more resilient to challenges and conflicts.
  • Vasco:

    "We need that ability to have that connection between people, so that we can tackle perhaps more urgent, perhaps more difficult topics…" (14:08)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Sara Di Gregorio on NVC:

  "The book helped me to shift from reacting to connecting, which completely changed the quality of conversation." (03:35)

• On the loss of informal connection:

  "I tried to recreate the situation… we create like a coffee or together. Okay, so today with the team we have 10 minutes all together drinking coffee." (08:45)

• On the importance of feedback spaces:

  "It was for me, a way to recollect all the coffee machine communication that we were losing…30 minutes on Friday to say, okay, recap of the week." (10:47)

• Vasco Duarte on social capital:

  "Scrum Masters can create the environment where that social capital can be built between people so that then harder situations are easier to tackle." (14:08)

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Segment Timestamps

| Topic | Timestamp | |--------------------------------------------|------------| | Introduction and book recommendation - NVC | 01:21–06:10| | Remote team challenges during COVID | 06:10–08:20| | Innovating remote connection rituals | 08:20–10:11| | Building feedback and recap rituals | 10:11–11:43| | Practical advice for Mechanized Teams | 12:39–13:51| | Host Reflection and Episode Wrap Up | 13:51–14:51|

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Takeaways for Scrum Masters

• Deliberately schedule informal touchpoints in remote settings—don’t rely on spontaneous connection to occur.
• Leverage NVC approaches to transform conversational dynamics and support deeper team understanding.
• Create regular feedback loops beyond formal retrospectives, that mimic the casual discourse of the in-office environment.
• Prioritize human-to-human discussions, not just task-based communications, to nurture trust and strengthen team culture.

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This episode is a timely, hands-on guide for Agile coaches and Scrum Masters seeking to sustain team vitality and resilience in evolving remote and hybrid work landscapes.

Transcript

[A]

Hey there, agile adventurer, just a quick question. What if, for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's this Scrum Master Toolbox membership. And it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast. Hello everybody. Welcome to our Team Tuesday. This week we have with us Sara DiGregorio. Hey Sara, welcome back.

[B]

Wow. Ciao. Good morning.

[A]

Good morning indeed. So Tuesday is Team Tuesday and we'll talk about teams in a second. But first tell us, what's the book that most inspired you in your career as a Scrum Master?

[B]

Well, the book that had a deep impact on me, it's Not Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. In Italian, the title is translated as Words are windows or they are walls. I read this book many years ago. The book explores how to listen without judging, how to ask the right questions and how to observe people in order to understand their real needs. But above all, it teach you how to communicate in a way that build connection rather than creating barriers. It was very important for me to read it because I saw this book very practical. So it was not only okay reading, but I experiment a lot of things after the reading. I think that without this mindset, it's easy to fall into how to say reactive communication. Trying to, for example, to defend, to justify or give quick answers. But that often blocks real understanding. For example, I tried to be more patient. The book helped me to shift from reacting to connecting, which completely changed the quality of conversation. I always tried to do quick answers because for me it was important to give quick answer. But I understood that maybe reflect one minute, it's not a problem. So this is what I learned from this book. And as a Scrum Master, the skill for me are essential. We work with people every day. So for example, facilitating meeting, mediating during meeting, supporting the team and the way we Communicate. It's very important because open the dialogue. We can have a lot the team to improve the dialogue and so discover, for example, from dependencies on the feature where they are working on or only communicating into the communication, into the team. That's why I believe every Scrum Master should read this book absolutely a lot.

[A]

And we have a few episodes. I'll put the link in the show notes specifically about nvc. Quite a few episodes for those that want to dive deeper into the topic. And I totally agree with you. I think NVC should be mandatory reading for all Scrum Masters also because it allows us to not relate in a, you call it defensive and so on, not relate in a reactive way to what is happening, but rather to allow the people and the teams to help each other. Because in the end we're helping them to help each other. Right? To help each other go through even difficult situations. And I think there's a few examples in the book that are much higher stakes than anything we do where through those methods people were able to reach positive outcomes for the conflicts that they were part of. And I think that's a great set of tools. So definitely love the recommendation there, Sara. And of course sometimes we need to apply these NVC skills also with the teams that we work. Although sometimes the NVC skills aren't enough either. Teams are not free from self destructing. And that's the topic we want to explore. Not because of what happens, but rather to understand what were the patterns in play, what were the things happening so that we may be able to detect those before it's too late when it finally happens to us as well. So, Sara, share with us the story of a team, give us a little bit about the context, and then walk us through those small little behaviors or patterns that emerged in the team that eventually led to problems.

[B]

Okay, first of all, during, for example, the COVID period, a lot of people were working only in remote. So it was not my case. But I read a lot of stories talking about that was fully remote but losing the real connection. Because I can understand that one habit, a bad habit that we can have, it's to be only working remotely without paying attention to the real connection that we have. So we can work remotely, but creating connections. So there are a lot of funny things that we can do during a period that we have to work fully remote. Or for example, there are a lot of companies that now work fully remote. I think it's very important, but we have to find different way of interaction. So because we have to build the Relationship and alignment. So we have to create opportunities for real interactions.

[A]

Do you have a specific team in mind, Sarah? Like as you are describing the remote setting and of course the need to be able to adapt to that fact that we are a remote team. Do you have a specific team in mind that you can describe what was happening to that team and how you started to build this, let's say, ability to connect and understand even though the team was remote?

[B]

Yeah. My only example is about the COVID because normally I work half in presence and half in remote. And at the beginning was very difficult to have all the people full time remote. So it was new also for me. So I tried at the beginning to have normal meetings. So the same way we used to have when was in presence. But I saw that it was not working very well. So for example, I started every meeting with I don't know, like five minutes chatting. So guys, how are you today? What's happened yesterday? So to create that connection that we were losing because of the full remote working. So to not meet every day, during the working day at the office or sometimes we create like a coffee or together. Okay, so today with the team we have 10 minutes or all together drinking coffee. So at the beginning was a little bit difficult because people I know, but I have a meeting, but I have. Okay, so please guys, we have to find like three times per week to have a coffee altogether. So only 10 minutes after lunch, for example, or at the end of the meeting we try to share some feedback because I think that remotely was difficult to share that feedback that we normally share in front of the coffee machine. So I tried to recreate this situation.

[A]

What worked the best for you? So you already introduced a couple of ideas and one of them was like having a chit chat. The other was about having like these special moments where we're not talking about work, but we're just talking with each other. What else did you try and how did that work?

[B]

I think that sharing the feedback was very useful because when we work remotely we only have meetings. So from 3 o' clock to 4 o'. Clock. Okay, bye bye, see you tomorrow. No, but it's important to introduce a moment, like a fixed moment during the week with person that we normally have more interactions or the person into our team to share feedback because it's important to say okay guys, for example on Friday. Okay guys, so how was the week? You can have a one to one. I experimented both. So like a one to one with some people or with the team and said okay, only 30 minutes talking to understand if this week was nice, if we can improve something during the next week. So it was for me, a way to recollect all the coffee machine communication that we were losing, that we were losing into these 30 minutes on Friday to say, okay, recap of the week. Try to understand if next week we can improve, if we had some misunderstanding during the week. If I manage something, I can manage something in a different way. So we try.

[A]

I'm sure there are many of our listeners out there that are right now facing this perhaps lack of comfort with the remote setting. Like, for example, something that I very often face with the teams that I work with, because I work with teams remotely mostly is the lack of time for unstructured, just people to people interactions, right? Like we have some face to face meetings, let's say every three months or so where we fly and we meet, but it's not the same because there's a lot of pressure of the things that need to happen in that three, whatever, three days, four days that we are together every quarter. So what do you think we could try? Like, what's an idea to try out for Scrum masters out there who are feeling that the interactions with the team have become kind of mechanized to formal, not enough people to people. What kind of tips do you have to share with us?

[B]

For me was to have a meeting fixed on the agenda. So for example, on Friday, and we can sometimes, what we experimented was to have coffee on Friday morning before to start, like, okay, 9 o', clock, we can meet before the daily Scrum, so before everything and say, okay, guys, so how was the week? So we tried to start this conversation with the team in a different way to say, okay, it's Friday. So thinking about the apparatus for the night, okay, it was at home. But I know that we had a lot of home apparatus in that period. And we tried to start in a very confidential way, but in the same time trying to, to talk about the past week. So it was very important to have this fixed moment in the morning in the agenda. It worked very well for me and.

[A]

I really see that. And also, of course, everybody needs to find the way that works for them. But I think one critical thing for me when it comes to working with remote teams has been to find the moments where it feels like we're relating to each other as people. Not here are the things I need you to do. Let's talk next steps. Because that kind of mechanizes the interaction. It removes the connection between people. And we always need that ability to have that connection between people so that we can tackle perhaps more urgent, perhaps more difficult topics, so that we need to build what we would call social capital with each other. And everybody does. It's not Scrum Masters only, right? Everybody does. But Scrum Masters can create the environment where that social capital can be built between people so that then harder situations are easier to tackle. Thank you for sharing that with us, Sara.

[B]

You're welcome. Thank you to you.

[A]

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