Progressivity in Hybrid Meetings: Daily Scrum as an Enabling Constraint for a Multi-Locational Software Development Team

Meetings that involve both collocated and remote participants can be hindered by various technological and human difficulties. Taking an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, this paper investigates how participants establish and maintain progressivity in hybrid meetings ensuring the continuous flow of work. Based on video-recorded data from hybrid daily Scrum meetings at a software development company, we focused on instances where participants are interrupted by problems diminishing the meeting progressivity. Our micro analysis shows that in the meetings resolution of work-progress related trouble is prioritized over the resolution of technical problems. To establish and maintain progressivity, participants orient to the organizational imperatives while simultaneously circumventing technical problems arising in the meetings. In overcoming problems, the different layers of organizational goals and meeting goals are accounted for in the common effort to get work done by (a) reminding of the time budget; (b) sticking to the agenda (c) reconfiguring responsibilities to fill in for missing members; and (d) referencing shared resources that reflect team progress. This analysis suggests that to improve hybrid and/or online meetings, practitioners should aim to increase the social intelligibility of activities scheduled for meetings by defining improved and specific meeting frameworks that promote continuity and reduce ambiguity.