[UweSchmidt]

Points for keeping one day meeting-free and batching meetings together. Deep work is the only useful kind of work, so getting one day of that is something! I'd be radical and suggest another of those deep work days to double productivity, but refering to your last point, organizational changes initiated by the team members are rare.

Generally, good changes would require scrum masters and tech leads to work harder, to really get to the bottom of a wide range of issues outside of superficial meetings, to actually understand how developers, testers and devops struggle, and to solve those problems. But it's easier to put the burden of articulating problems through public speaking on generally introvert developers who then risk incriminating themselves in the process.

> 2) In the beginning of the stand-up, I make space for some minutes of casual chatting and joking around.

In a work environment it is extremely hard for people to truly enjoy jokes and chats when everyone, including soft leadership, is present. People are very much concerned with their standing within the organization and if they are good enough to remain, or advance. If that is not an issue, frustrations with many work-related disappointments and sometimes colleagues are main concerns for software people. It would take a truly remarkable individual to lead such a casual time of cracking jokes in everyone's second language in multicultural teams over video call, when their livelihood or sanity is on the line, rather than it being a stressful performative act for half the team.

[jukvalim]

It's interesting how people bring their own context and culture into things - which is where I assume your comment comes from. Also another reason why one size fits all processes or methods are not a good idea.

My team is a monocultural one, in a Nordic country. We're remote by choice, and because some of us live in other cities. Nordic countries have the lowest power distances in the world, which is relevant to how social interactions work out. Also, in my experience, software developers here don't typically worry that much about their standing in the organization, or about advancing in the organization, or being kicked out. Of course some do, but I don't think it's a cultural focus here like it might be in some other places. If you look at the discussion forums for devs here, those concerns hardly ever come up. Talking about raising salary by switching companies is way more common topic.

We have plenty of time for deep work on other days too. It just that in earlier phases of the project there were more meetings, so we set up the deep work day to make sure one day can be totally uninterrupted.

When it comes to articulating problems, I feel our people are vocal enough. Not all the time, but if there's something annoying or frustrating during a sprint, I feel that it comes out during a retro. It's the process improvement ideas where I feel like I'm the most active one - which is fair enough, since it's an area of interest not all people have.