In the best, most productive teams I’ve worked with, people acted very naturally. On those teams, there were a lot of casual conversations where people talked about different things not related to work, people joked and laughed, but there was also the ability for the team to focus intensely and to be incredibly productive. I did some thinking, trying to figure out the conditions that created those teams, and I concluded that it always came down to treating everyone like people.

What if we did away with typical Agile frameworks and instead created a way of working that treats people as humans, not just output-producing resources?

While Agile practices can be beneficial and provide lots of benefits, the problems come from how easily they can be misused in ways that damage teams and limit people’s potential. It’s too easy for organizations to implement “Agile” and end up with a high-stress, high-WIP, waterfall-like culture plagued by poor power dynamics and mediocre performance. Could we achieve better employee and business outcomes if we focused only on ways of working that keep things human?

Succeed by Treating People Like People

A human-centred approach to work would focus on creating an environment where people connect with their tasks and with each other. Every practice would focus on doing what’s right for the team members and supporting them.

Work with People You Like and Trust

One practice that illustrates this is to form teams only with people who like and trust each other. You wouldn’t normally spend time with people you don’t like or trust in other parts of your life, yet it’s often accepted at work. When you’re working with people you genuinely like and want to spend time with, it makes everything easier.

Work Closely in Small Groups

It’s more natural and effective to work closely with a small number of people. It fosters stronger bonds and makes communication easier. These small groups should also be focused on a narrow, human-scaled domain of work.

As systems and projects grow, and people are assigned to teams of 20 or 30 people, what happens is a collaboration mess where people constantly get blocked waiting for others, dealing with problems and get stuck in endless meetings meant to figure out who’s doing what.

Let People Succeed Based on Their Strengths

There shouldn’t be a single personality or skill profile that people must match to be successful. This often leads to the same type of people being promoted and receiving all the opportunities, while everyone else is passed over because they’re different. Work should be a place where people can be successful in their own unique way.

Expect Mistakes

People make mistakes, and people learn. Decisions will sometimes be wrong. Mistakes are a natural part of work. A human-centred workplace understands this and makes plans expecting mistakes to happen. The world has too many “Agile teams” making large investments and creating complicated waterfall plans that expect things to go right the first time.

Work Should Follow a Natural Rhythm

To avoid burnout and keep people engaged, work needs to follow a human rhythm, rather than being one endless sprint or crunch. People should work for a while, see some progress, take a breather, then work some more. Efforts that require years of intense work before showing tangible results are unnatural, and they drain people’s energy and motivation. Small, frequent wins and time for reflection keep people engaged.

Work Should Be a Bit Fun

On productive teams, people can smoothly and naturally transition between casual conversations, joking, and laughing, and then shift to intense focus and problem-solving. Genuine discussions don’t need Managers or Scrum Masters trying to control everything.

Teams Should Care About Their Users

People building software should know who they’re building it for. They need to care about their users’ needs and challenges. Caring about users gives work meaning and purpose. Without meaning and purpose, work is just tickets, tasks, and features—and it becomes just a job where people clock in and clock out.

It doesn’t make sense for people to develop software for nobody.

What Makes Work Less Human

On the flip side, some common practices chip away at people’s humanity and make work feel unstimulating. They ultimately hurt productivity, leading to disengagement and burnout, even during an “Agile transformation.”

Estimates

Asking people to guess how long their work will take is a strange practice. People are naturally bad at estimating, and producing estimates can take a lot of time. There are better alternatives, such as forecasting based on historical data, but achieving that reliability requires some maturity. The easier and better alternative is always to make things smaller.

Working software over everything.

In-Office Mandates

Telling people when and where they have to work, especially with strict back-to-office mandates, is inhuman. Teams should be accountable for figuring out what works best for them. I don’t mean this in a laissez-faire way; I mean teams should be responsible for doing the work of solving the problem, trying things out, getting better, and showing results.

Controlling Communication

It’s a bizarre dynamic that can exist in the corporate world, but I’ve heard of managers who set rules about who their team members can and can’t communicate with, forcing all communications to go through them first. Telling adults who they can and can’t talk to is a terrible perversion of managerial power and treats workers like children instead.

Split Offshore Teams

The risks and issues that come with splitting teams with offshore people are often too high, and when things go wrong, they’re more challenging to fix.

Telling people, “Half your team is on the other side of the world, you’ll likely never meet them, they have a completely different work culture and holiday schedule, and your workdays only overlap for three hours” doesn’t make sense.

The Human Core of Agile

Agile frameworks and practices provide us with valuable tools, but too much money is being wasted on Agile implementations that harm individuals and teams. This thought experiment was an exercise in thinking about what kind of teams we would get if we relied on a simple set of human-centred principles to guide how we work.

Could we achieve a culture that supports Agile or even achieves the same outcomes simply by ensuring that our work environments prioritize human dignity and well-being?

Focusing on “human work” gives us a simpler lens to judge how things are done. It’s also another way to look at organizations that have already been implementing Agile, to look past all the Scrum job titles, layers of managers, and daily meetings, and judge whether the results have had a positive human impact.

Are people happier? Are teams more productive? These should be easy questions to answer.