Working Agreements

• Send a message to the team explaining the Play to ensure everyone understands the topic and goal of the meeting: to create a set of behavioral agreements that will guide how to work together.

• Create a collaborative document, such as a Trello board, whiteboard, or a Confluence page.

• Send the document to the team at least a few days ahead of the Play with instructions on what to do. (See “Team member prep” and “Leader prep” below.) Provide context around working agreements and the importance they play in setting up a team for success. If you’ve created a Team Poster, include that in your message to remind everyone of the team’s purpose and objectives.

• Collect issues the team is currently facing, either from a Retrospective or previous experiences and feedback. These challenges will inform the Play.

Ask each person to fill out the template with one or two thoughts about each of the following topics. (People can also link to their User Manual to explain more about how they work best.)

• Name

• Working location and time zone

• Working hours and commitments

• Working environment and preferences

• How I like receiving feedback

• Context about me

Before the live Play workshop, fill out a draft of 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 communication in that space. For example, you may use Confluence as the single source of truth for documentation and planning, along with Slack for daily communication.

Escalation process

As the saying goes, a failure to plan is a plan to fail. Consider how you want your team to escalate pressing issues or make decisions when they can’t reach a consensus. Fill in who the decider is, how you will handle escalations, what level of transparency you will provide, and how you will inform others of decisions.

Not sure 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.

Open the workshop by recapping the purpose of the meeting and setting some mutual agreements for the workshop, such as asking the team to:

• Keep an open, curious mind

• Practice active listening and encourage everyone to contribute

• Minimize distractions and maximize connection: phones away, cameras on, ‘Do not disturb’ on

• Try not to interrupt others, and give everyone an opportunity to speak

• Remember that the working agreements will be adjusted over time

Next, provide a summary of the current team challenges gathered before the workshop. These challenges help spark ideas for how to improve ways of working.

Then, give the team five minutes to silently read through the draft document that everyone contributed to as pre-work. Team members can comment on the page too.

Finally, ask each person to share one new thing they learned about another team member. This will help everyone get to know each other better and warm up the conversation.

Take ten minutes to discuss and edit the Communication Channels section as a team. You can make edits to the digital document and/or write ideas on a physical whiteboard if you’re meeting in person. (Just make sure to document digital notes from the physical whiteboard for future reference.)

Conversation 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?

Collaboration is essential to hitting your team’s goals, but it doesn’t always require a meeting. During this part of the workshop, you’ll discuss as a team why, when, and how to use synchronous meetings and asynchronous communication, such as sending written updates with a tool like Slack, video updates with a tool like Loom, or brainstorming with a tool like Confluence whiteboards.

(Trying to decide whether synchronous or asynchronous communication makes more sense? See the difference between sync vs. async so you can choose which medium is best for each situation.) 

As you narrow down the cases when a meeting is needed, talk through these questions with your team to audit existing meetings and thoughtfully plan for the future:

• What types of meetings are needed?

• What meeting format will help accomplish our goals? (Page-led meetings are especially effective.)

• What cadence and length are appropriate?

• Who should attend, and what are their roles in the meeting?

• Which of these meetings will we allow an AI notetaker to attend by default?

When async communication is a good alternative, talk through these questions with your team:

• What types of async communication will help us accomplish our goals? (e.g., written messages, videos, whiteboarding, etc.)

• Who should be involved, and what are their roles? (e.g., Who’s creating content, and by when? Who’s contributing, and by when? Who’s reviewing, and by when)?

• What should the cadence be?

Figuring out the right balance between sync and async communication may take some experimentation. Finish this part of the conversation by discussing: When should we review if this is working?

Review and edit the Escalation Process section that your leader started. Discuss as a team any additions or changes that need to be made until the team comes to a consensus.

The working agreements set during this workshop are simply a starting point that can – and should – be updated over time. As the final step of the workshop, discuss how you will adjust these agreements as the team learns and grows.

Conversation starters:

• When should we revisit these working agreements, and why? (e.g., quarterly based on lessons learned, after a big milestone, etc.)

• How will we decide if an agreement needs to be adjusted?

• What level of transparency is required and/or “nice to have”?

• How will we share any changes?

Revisit regularly

Beyond quarterly working agreement reviews, it’s also helpful to revisit when onboarding new team members, during team reorgs, when work scenarios change, or when an agreement can no longer be upheld. This is especially important if your team transitions to hybrid or fully distributed work. 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 any additional agreements.

If an agreement can’t be upheld, discuss what might be getting in the way.