If you’ve suddenly found yourself working remotely due to COVID-19 precautions, how do you handle all the normal day-to-day things like meetings, tracking tasks, and basic communication? Team norms don’t need to be complicated just because everyone’s remote. Being a fully distributed company ourselves, we have learned a lot over the years that helps us keep our teams running smoothly.

If you’re “unexpectedly locked out of the office,” as we’re calling it, now is the time to adapt practices to manage stakeholders and customers effectively. No matter whether you’re remote or in the conference room, the goals remain the same: Keep everyone focused on what matters, keep moving on projects, and keep to financial and organizational milestones effectively (with only a few more gray hairs by the time the crisis is over).

Whether your workplace is remote permanently or temporarily, psychological safety is elementary in the experience of high-performing teams. Without psychological safety, the consequences would be far-reaching and destructive to the individual and the organization. But cultivating psychological safety is hard work, especially on remote teams.

If your team has found themselves locked out of the scrum room and working in a new or unfamiliar way, resolving the urgent and important impediments facing your team needs to be their primary focus.