  Although the public health emergency related to the coronavirus disease 2019
(COVID-19) pandemic has officially ended, many software developers still work
partly from home. Agile teams that coordinate their office time foster a sense
of unity, collaboration, and cohesion among team members. In contrast, teams
with limited co-presence may experience challenges in establishing
psychological safety and developing a cohesive and inclusive team culture,
potentially hindering effective communication, knowledge sharing, and trust
building. Therefore, the effect of agile team members not being co-located
daily must be investigated. We explore the co-presence patterns of 17 agile
teams in a large agile telecommunications company whose employees work partly
from home. Based on office access card data, we found significant variation in
co-presence practices. Some teams exhibited a coordinated approach, ensuring
team members are simultaneously present at the office. However, other teams
demonstrated fragmented co-presence, with only small subgroups of members
meeting in person and the remainder rarely interacting with their team members
face-to-face. Thus, high average office presence in the team does not
necessarily imply that team members meet often in person at the office. In
contrast, non-coordinated teams may have both high average office presence and
low frequency of in-person interactions among the members. Our results suggest
that the promotion of mere office presence without coordinated co-presence is
based on a false assumption that good average attendance levels guarantee
frequent personal interactions. These findings carry important implications for
research on long-term team dynamics and practice.
