What remote teams need from their meetings

2026-10-23 · The Scrums team

A remote retro isn't an in-person retro on a video call. The things that make a room work, like seeing who's still writing or hearing the timer, have to be built into the tool.

Put a team in a room for a retrospective and a lot happens without anyone arranging it. You can see who's still writing. You can tell when the room has run out of things to say. The facilitator glances at the clock and everyone notices. Someone half-raises a hand.

Move the same team onto a video call with a shared whiteboard and most of those signals disappear. The facilitator asks "is everyone done?" into silence. Quiet people stay quiet. The meeting overruns because nobody can see the time.

Remote and hybrid work is now how a great many teams operate, often across time zones. The tools for their meetings need to put those signals back.

What Scrums puts back

Who's here, and what they're doing. Everyone in a session can see who's present, and during writing, "3 people are writing" tells you who isn't finished.
A ready meter. People mark themselves done, and the facilitator sees how many are, instead of asking.
A shared clock. The countdown timer is the same on every screen, and it chimes when time's up.
The call is in the meeting. Start a voice call from the meeting itself, with cameras if you want them and screen sharing when you need it. No second app, no second link.
Hands. Raise your hand in a call, and the hosts see the raised hands in the order they went up.
Small groups. Hosts can split a call into up to twenty breakout rooms, then bring everyone back.
Nobody holds the meeting hostage. If the facilitator's connection drops, anyone can take over.

A voice call in Scrums, with the people in it and the call's controls — Calls run inside the meeting, not in a second app.

It works on corporate networks

Many companies' networks block or degrade the connections video-call apps rely on. Calls in Scrums use the same kind of connection as the rest of the app, so if the app loads, the call works: through the same proxies and firewalls, with nothing extra to open up.

Try a retro in your browser, no account needed, or sign up and run your team's next one remotely.