The only constant between every Agile organization I’ve been in is the forced meetings. Everything else was up to interpretation.
I mean... sometimes you need to course-correct, no? And cross pollination is useful, isn't it?
"Just Shut Up And Get It Done" workflow means that people might be spinning their wheels building the wrong thing (or duplicate things) in their silos.
Come on, there's got to be a few meetings to synchronize vision, scope, etc. within a team.
One thing mentioned in Sutherland's book on Scrum I rarely see repeated is the idea of also delivering happiness, and the sprint "kaizen" (or "improvement").
One person on our team suggested the daily standups were dumb, and we should try dropping them as next sprint's kaizen idea. Everyone else disagreed, but he felt really strongly against meetings, so we did it, it was only one sprint. And it turns out he was entirely right, at least for our team. We kept it that way until eventually that project was completed and the team was shifted around to other teams. We can't convince any of our new teams to try any of these things, but the same dynamic also isn't there to really encourage that.
Moreover, for certain types of work (such as, for instance, building platforms) a forced "design" and specification phase would probably be a net benefit. As they say, "half a year of coding can save you two weeks of planning". Except when you also release your shit to users you can't fix your old design mistakes because everyone depends on them now.
I've started rotating agile manifesto principles in my email signature as a slightly passive aggressive way of trying to get the message across. It's not working.
Might be lost in translation - but agile shouldn't require a ton of meeting time and should work fine remotely. And hey, one of the principles is that you give teams the environment they need to get the job done, not the environment management thinks they deserve.
Unless you mean "Agile" as, say, UK government terms it, also known as waterfall. In which case, yes, you can expect to be required to be in meetings all day in a terrible office space. Feel my pain.