On Getting Everyone on The Same Page

This Week’s Topic: Team Working Agreements

1 Strategy 🎯 

High performing teams don’t happen by chance.

They are deliberately, and collaboratively, designed.

And they all have one thing in common.

A shared understanding of what is expected of every single team member.

How do you get everyone on the same page?

Enter the Team Working Agreement (TWA)

I first learned about the power of TWAs from Sacha Connor, an organizational development consultant who helps brick and mortar businesses make the transition to a hybrid/remote workforce.

While a TWA can take many forms, at its core it is a formal document that clearly outline how your team works together, and what behaviors are expected. 

Your working agreements can cover a wide spectrum of topics ranging from logistical (e.g., meeting expectations and tool usage) to cultural (e.g., values, performance feedback, and how to resolve conflicts).

Here are a few examples of team agreements around meeting expectations:

• “We work 9a-5p local time and don’t expect others to respond to chat or email outside working hours”

• “We start each team meeting with an icebreaker to cultivate personal connection”

• “When a participant is more than 10 minutes late to a meeting, we generally don’t expect the facilitator to pause and catch them up”

• “Meeting minutes are shared within 24 hours of the meeting”

• “We keep our videos on during meetings”

As you gather proposed agreements from the team, some agreements will seem like common sense - document them anyway.

More polarizing proposals like “we refrain from discussing politics” may spur some healthy debate. That’s ok!

Here are some prompts to help you and your team get started on your Team Working Agreement Journey:

1. Team Values: What is important to us as a team?

2. Behavioral Agreements: What behaviors can we collectively agree to?

3. Learnings from Other Teams: Reflecting on the most successful teams you’ve been a part of, what practices could our team adopt? Now reflect on underperforming team you were on; how can we avoid making similar mistakes?

And remember - this is a living document. As your team grows and evolves, so should your TWAs. Incorporating TWA reviews into the onboarding process is a great way to capture feedback from new team members, while keeping the agreements fresh and relevant.

Reply to this email and let me know how it goes! I look forward to hearing from you.

See you next Wednesday,

Darin

(If you’re new here, feel free to sign up using the subscribe button below)