How to create a Team Agreement

A Team Agreement is a set of guidelines created collaboratively by team members to establish expectations for behaviour, communication, and workflow.​

It's particularly helpful when establishing new teams and groups.​

 

A Team Agreement is:

- A simple, collaborative document: Created with input from all team members to ensure buy-in and relevance.​

- Living document: Regularly reviewed and updated as the team evolves.​

- Behavioural guide: Sets out expectations for communication, meetings, conflict resolution, and work habits.​

- Accountability tool: Provides specified ways the team will hold each other accountable.

But it’s not:
​
- Rigid: It’s flexible and adaptable, not a fixed set of rules.​

- Leader's edict: It’s not imposed by a leader but agreed collectively.​

- One-size-fits-all: There is no one approach that will work for all of CC – instead each is specific to the BU's dynamics and work style.​

- One and done: It will evolves with your BU and its challenges and opportunities

 

The process to create a Team Agreement

Initiate: Engage the team and explain the purpose and benefits of creating a team agreement. You might also show them some examples to make it concrete for them.​

Co-create: ​There are two main ways to do this.

If you have a smaller group (e.g. <20), you might use a workshop, working through sections and encouraging people to contribute their ideas and expectations.​

If you have a larger group, you might instead choose a way for people to contribute digitally, either during an All Hands meeting or in their own time. This could be a digital whiteboard or even a survey.

Whichever route you choose, make sure you have:

- helped people understand what a Team Agreement is (and isn't), why it's important and how it's used

- broken the agreement people are contributing to into clear sections so that it's clear how to add thoughts and ideas (there's a simple guide to these later in this article)

- made it clear that it's not a set of rules but a set of explicit norms so people can make informed choices in each situation

 

Draft: Summarise the discussions or contributions into a draft agreement.​ A shared Powerpoint is a good place to start, allowing you to create sections and helping people consume information quickly. It's more dynamic than a long document and you can add to it as you go.

Refine: Share the draft for feedback and fine tune it.​

Agree: Ensure all team members agree to the final version and sign off on it – perhaps with some kind of ritual?

Implement: Start following the guidelines and integrate them into daily work – as a leader, you have a particular role to model them.​

Revisit: Schedule regular check ins to the agreement to make improvements and reflect changes to the BU.​

 

 

What might go in your Team Agreement?

Here are the sections that most Team Agreements will cover, one way or another. Feel free to adapt these.

- What is particularly important to keep in mind when working in this BU

- Shared expectations about office time vs working from home, work hours and availability and time blocking for deep work

- Meeting guidelines: what meetings are used frequently and what the BU etiquette is for scheduling, leading attending and capturing the outcomes of meetings.

- How decisions are made to ensure inclusivity and transparency

- How you will address and resolve conflicts in meetings and beyond.

- What goes where (information, comms etc)​ e.g. Simple or quick questions ---> async chat whereas complex or long questions ---> weekly team check in (add to the shared agenda which is always stored in the same place)

- What something is code for e.g. headphones on = DND, or video off on a call means you're multi-tasking or thumbs up to a Teams chat post means you've read it

- Async / chat rules e.g. what is an acceptable timeframe for response?

- Rituals and celebrations e.g. Atlassian's agree official celebration snack :-) ​“We celebrate wins with donuts (when we’re together in person) or donut-related gifs in our Slack channel (when we’re apart).”​

 

As part of this you might consider:

- who does what (individual contributors vs team leaders vs project managers)?

- are there any standards or templates we're going to align around?

 

You will never get all these right first time. Set the expectation that this is a draft and you'll refine it together as you go. Encourage people to ask "where does this go?" and "How do we do this in this BU?"

 

Important note!

The biggest risk is that what emerges is a bland, generally applicable set of guidelines that could work anywhere and actually provide little real guidance. For example, a statement like "we respect all opinions" will mean different things to different people. Your Team Agreement will explain how you make sure that always happens. 

Team Agreements should be specific, literal and explicit. That doesn't mean it's a rule book - but it's a guide to what the team has agreed is generally helpful and acceptable. These norms inform people's decisions in the moment.

Here is an example of a really specific Team Agreement!

 

   

Or you might summarise some of your Team Agreement as "It's ok to..."

 

 

Create a one-page summary of your Team Agreement.

This is for other BUs to view and is essentially a 'How To Collaborate With Us' crib sheet and will help people from other BUs settle in if they are working on a project in your BU. If a multi-BU team gets going on a project, sharing the various BU Team Agreement summaries is a helpful starter for a discussion about how this cross functional team can work well together.

 

  

Build in a reflection cycle

Without deliberately thinking about what is and isn't working together, people just get frustrated and resist - or just start doing things how they've always done them.

So plan in some specific points at which you will review the whole Agreement as a BU - perhaps every three months? This will surface some important issues - this is a good thing! Plan time to address them too.

Also, open up a clear channel through which people can comment at any other time. You might decide that anyone can propose an edit - or even make that edit, like an open wiki. Or you might put key changes out for discussion or vote.

 

 

How to use your Team Agreement

As a leader, you acting in alignment and support of the Team Agreement is the most powerful way to embed it. If you need to deviate from it, explicit share why. 

Refer to it regularly. Screenshot elements of it and include in presentations or meetig notes to emphasise your collaboration philosophy.

Encourage people to stress test it, perhaps one team at a time.

Use it to onboard new team members, offering them a crystal clear view of how the team works.

 

And finally...

Let's be clear. This is not trying to turn collaboration into a tick box exercise. In fact, it's the opposite. It's about streamlining the basics via some simple architecture to create the space and clarity to access people's best contribution - and THAT'S what unleashes the real human engagement and collaboration we need. 

Whether you use this method or something entirely different, the goal is to create some explicit, well designed norms that scaffold and help people contribute with less friction. Let us know how you get on!