The Power of Team Working Agreements
Take a moment to think back to your most memorable team working experience. *Hopefully you’re in that team right now!* Either way, what characteristics made the experience so memorable?
Was it the people? The culture within the organization? The environment you worked in? Or was it certain processes or tools you really loved working with?
In most cases, if you were to characterize the attributes of this amazing team under those five categories- people, culture, environment, processes or tools- your list would likely be most heavily weighted towards people and culture. Yes, people within a team can often make or break the overall team experience.
Now what if I told you that you could create your most memorable team right now, and in just a few simple steps? Enter the team working agreement! You’ve likely already heard of something like this, but does your team have working agreements in place right now? It should! Good team working agreements enhance the overall team experience in several ways:
- They take the implicit ways we want to be treated as team members and make them explicit.
- They surface what behaviours are valued by the team and create a context where team members can show how they’re valued.
- They create a shared sense of responsibility for the success of the team, making every individual aware of how their own behaviours and contributions impact the team.
- They demonstrate a high level of commitment from each team member to each other and to the overall success of the team and their work.
- They offer clear guidance on what the team can do if someone is letting them down by not holding to the team agreement.
So what would a working agreement look like for a high-performing team? This looks different for every team and every circumstance. When our team was new, we set out basic working agreements that outlined how we would communicate with each other and share information (for example, using Microsoft Teams for chat and file sharing). This was important as a new team who was also working completely remote. As time went on, we continued to evolve these agreements to allow for the specific needs of our team (for example, a commitment to a regular cadence of team retrospectives as well as an agreement to limit the number of training sessions to two per week). Good working agreements are a reflection of the team’s maturity and continue to mature as the team does.
Team working agreements don’t need to be/shouldn’t be rigid rules devoid of the human side of teams. They should show the spirit of the team at a glance, and ideally include room for having fun together (if this is a priority for your team)! The agreements should focus not only on how teammates interact, but also on how the team will measure and track their successes. Always remember the purpose of the agreements- a real commitment from the entire team to achieving together, not just a list of rules for the sake of it. It’s better to have 3 agreements that we consistently hold to as a team instead of 10 agreements we only follow sometimes.
Do you have team working agreements in place? If not, the start of this New Year might be the perfect time to sit together and put some in place! Schedule a retrospective to inspect how your team has been working together and see if that doesn’t naturally lead to the creation of some working agreements. Continue this process of inspecting and adapting and add or edit agreements as it is appropriate. Your team will thank you for making what once might have felt implicit more explicit and for continuing to help them to grow to be the best team yet!
