Being off and Team Commitment
As the team develops in practicing real Scrum, team members see missing any scrum activity as something painful. Scrum is about people and making them work as a unit more powerful than the sum of the individual powers. That kind of power is lost when someone misses ANY scrum activity.
Off Sick
In practice, punctuality is a supreme rule and Scrum activities have priority over other work activities.
Unexpected events require good judgment, I don’t suspend a scrum activity because someone is sick, unless the Product Owner is sick for the Sprint Review, in such case we have a prioritized Product Backlog so we can pull up the next high priority User Story from it. Maybe the PO is not so sick to be present by phone. Conversely, a team member can present by phone in case of a unforeseen event. Slipping dates undermines commitment.
The team itself sees unfavorably when unjustifiably someone misses or arrives late to a meeting. And that person suffers the lack of involvement and tries hard for not suffer that again. The team become self-managed.
Everybody understand when some is off sick. You have to live with that when rarely occurs. Suffering means “Hey, those meeting are really important, I don’t miss them better”
In cases of someone’s sickness (I have dealt with that quite a few times) I try to keep that person updated, as much as possible, that’s the best way to reduce the absence effects.
On the other hand, if the team frequently experiences “being off” frames, scrum can hardly be done, and by my experience, that team is hardly a team.
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