Working Agreements in action
These software developers discuss their working agreements on Zoom and use Trello to capture input.
A remote campaign team brainstorms and votes for which working agreements they will commit to and captures input in Confluence.
A fundraising team’s completed Working Agreements Play.
What you'll need
Remote
Video conferencing with screen sharing
Digital collaboration tool (see templates)
In-person
Meeting space
Whiteboard or large sheet of paper
Digital collaboration tool (see templates)
Markers
Sticky notes
Optional templates
Atlassian Templates
Instructions for running this Play
1. Prep 5 MIN
This is a 3-part Play. In the steps below we will work through the details of each one of these parts. The goal is to focus on how your team is going to be successful working together, without spending hours in meetings!
- Team: Complete and review the pre-work asynchronously.
- Leader: Prepare to set the tone.
- All: Agree and commit to discussion topics in a live workshop.
Start by creating a collaboration document such as a Trello board or Confluence page. You can use the templates linked above for in-person or remote meetings. Optionally, if you are doing this Play in-person, whiteboarding your concepts can increase collaboration. Just make sure you document the outputs for future reference.
2. Team prep 5 MIN
Send the template to your team members in advance of the live workshop. Provide context around Working Agreements and the importance they play in setting up a team for success. Make sure to mark the document as a draft or work in progress. Send out your Team Poster to familiarize every team member with what you’re doing as a team and why. Haven’t got a good shared understanding of your team’s purpose and objectives? Start by running the Team Poster Play.
Ask your team members to each share the following:
- Name
- Working location and timezone
- Working hours and commitments
- Working environment and preferences
- How I like receiving feedback
- Context about me. Limit this to one or two points for this exercise. For bonus points, encourage team members to link to their User Manual to explain more about how they work best.
TIP: CREATE YOUR USER MANUAL
A great way to help new team members, contractors, project teams, stakeholders and network teams onboard onto your team quickly is to complete a User Manual that explains how you like to work.
TIP: TIMEZONE WRANGLING
Have a distributed team working across multiple time zones? It can help to map out collaboration windows to create a shared understanding on the hours that best suit synchronous activities
3. Leader prep 10 MIN
In advance of the live workshop, ask the team leader to complete a first attempt at the following two sections in the template.
Communication channels
Consider how your team is going to effectively communicate. Fill in the channel, its purpose, the audience, and any standards set for communications in that space. For example, you may use Confluence for the documentation of the official source of truth for a project, and Slack as your daily team communication space.
Escalation process
Any good team knows that failure to plan is a plan to fail. Consider how you want the team to escalate when there is a pressing issue that can’t reach a consensus. Fill in who the decider is, how you will handle an escalation, what level of transparency you will provide, and how you will inform others of the decision.
Not sure of how to handle escalations? Try our DACI decision-making framework. You can also work with your team to provide a Clean Escalations pathway that will outline options for escalation and guide better decision-making.
4. Set the stage 5 MIN
Open the meeting by explaining to the team that as a group you’re creating a set of behavioral agreements to guide how to work well together.
Ask the team to:
- Keep an open, curious mind
- Practice active listening and encourage everyone to contribute
- Minimize distractions and maximize connection: phones away, webcams on, and ‘Do not disturb’ switched on
- Avoid interrupting or dominating the conversation
- Remember that this will be adjusted in the future as circumstances change
Spend five minutes silently reading as a team through the draft document prepared in advance. During this time, team members can comment on the page. Kick off the discussion stage by asking everyone to share one thing that they learned about another team member.
TIP: PEOPLE, NOT PROCESS
This Play is about working together as people. If ideas around work management come up, such as documenting technical processes or project management workflow, get the team back on track and set up a time to talk through specific task management processes for the involved team members.
5. Establish communication channels 10 MIN
Take ten minutes to discuss the Communication Channels section with the team.
Discussion thought-starters:
- Any additions, removals, or changes?
- When should we review if this is working?
- How do we want other teams, leaders or stakeholders to communicate with us?
TIP: REACH COMPROMISE, NOT CONSENSUS
Having trouble agreeing on the best way to achieve results as a team? It’s very common for team members to have different preferences; one team member may prefer to use Slack, while another prefers a live Zoom call. Utilize voting to get to a comfortable compromise to try as a team, with the promise that this is not a set and forget! You will learn and improve as a team over time.
6. Establish meetings 30 MIN
Fill out the meetings section. Start with the overarching principle that focus time is precious. To make room for getting stuff done (GSD), some rules can apply to support this: having fewer meetings is better and optimizes for asynchronous communication over synchronous. Curious how you can transition your company meeting culture? Start with our course on How to Run Effective Meetings.
Discussion thought-starters:
- What is the desired objective and outcomes?
- What format of meetings do we want?
- Who attends meetings? What are their roles and teams?
- What mediums and tools do we need?
- How will we show up?
- How do we manage follow up?
- When should we review if this is working?
EXAMPLE: IDEAS
Here is an example of a team’s brainstorm on meetings.
Notice that ideas range from products to behaviors and process improvements.
7. Escalation management 10 MIN
Review the Escalation process section together. As a team, discuss what actions you will take and commit to a decision. Ensure the whole team is in agreement.
8. Continuous improvement 10 MIN
One of the most important things to cover as a team is planning ahead for learning and adapting together. Discuss the rituals and communication standards.
Discussion thought-starters:
- Sharing feedback
- Lessons learned
- Celebrate success
- Personal milestones
Follow-up
Revisit regularly
Revisit your team’s working agreements periodically, especially when onboarding new team members, during team re-orgs, when work scenarios change, or an agreement can no longer be upheld. This is especially important if you were once an in-office team that has become hybrid or fully remote. Your rituals and agreements will have to change to accommodate different geographies, time zones, and technology.
Go through and vote to keep or change existing agreements. Then have team members brainstorm, propose, and vote on adding any additional agreements.
If an agreement can’t be upheld, discuss what might be getting in the way.
Like any guideline, Working Agreements are like a muscle that need to be flexed. Reiterate the agreements often and pin the link to your team page in Atlas, encouraging teammates to review them on a quarterly basis. Keep this documentation open and top-of-mind during all major projects or any moments of conflict.
Variations
Reflections
Test your working agreement with a set of reflections:
- Think of teams that work together well. What do those teams do that we could adopt?
- What can we do on this team to avoid past mistakes from other teams?
EXAMPLE: IMPEDIMENTS BOARD
Here’s how a team documented their challenges in an impediments board.
Lead with challenges
Prior to the Working Agreements session, collect issues the team is currently facing, either from an impediments board (see example), a Retrospective, or just known challenges. Bring these and share them at the session to help inform the working agreements.
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