In Part 3 of the series, “Four Keys to Thriving Workers and Successful Organizations“, Jan Johnson and Yong In advocate for team agreements: what they include and their value to organizations.
We see so many organizations struggling to craft and re-craft effective RTO strategies, to right-size their workplace portfolios and, most importantly, to understand how work is now being done—when THE best sources of insights and expertise are under their noses: the teams doing the work.
Rather than relying only on individual preferences for how work gets done, we are convinced that developing team-level agreements is a powerful way to establish clear group expectations, foster trust, and ensure smooth and efficient team operations—as well as promoting the clear communication and understanding of each other’s expectations that are key to successful collaboration. And we – as workplace strategists or designers – get the information we need to help inform those strategies organizations are trying to resolve.
Granted, teams who – pre-pandemic – used to rely on daily presence in the office to do their work might – post-pandemic – still be testing or constructing new patterns for individual or collective activities. The opportunity is to meet them where they’re at and offer structured ways of first identifying their whys and their most business-critical activities and then helping them explore how/when/where they can optimally perform those activities.
Team agreements are an effective set of guidelines to balance and align the needs of the organization, the team, and the individual.
The team agreements should be tailored to each specific team, as every team would have their own unique needs, preferences, and specific requirements based on the task at hand. For example, the R&D team or engineers may need to be on-site more often, compared to the Sales team who tends to be off-site meeting with the clients. The team-level agreement of a highly collaborative team would look different from the team with many independent contributors. As each team may have different needs, goals, and constraints, their team agreements need to be discussed, piloted/tested, and adjusted over time to meet the changing needs.
Team agreements include three parts:
ACTIVITIES STRATEGY: Given a team’s goals/objectives—whether staying the same or changing—what do they determine they should start doing, stop doing or keep doing? Said another way, what might be de-prioritized and what needs to be re/more highly-prioritized to best meet their goals?
ACTIVITIES TACTICS: How might they execute these most important activities – especially those they do collectively with teammates or other colleagues? What do they feel would be optimal in answering where, when, how, and with what and whom? Are the more complex activities better performed with everyone in person when possible? If so, who needs to be there (people); what locational/spatial (place) attributes are needed – i.e., the ability to reserve the space most conducive to the activity – capacity, layout, acoustical or visual separation, posture-supportive furniture, display capabilities, nearby access to natural light, food and beverage, etc., and the equipment (technology) to enable projection, display capture, record conversations, etc.
TEAM VALUES / NORMS: What are the team’s unwritten rules about how they make themselves available to each other – i.e., establishing core collaboration hours, or when members have dedicated focus time, or how they communicate in off hours, or what their collective expectations are for response time? Team might also develop norms around accountability, feedback, after-project reviews and remote meeting etiquette.
Facilitating team agreements have at least five valuable benefits:
- They set process expectations: Two-way interaction enables two-way dialogue to set parameters and expectations of how the team operates, and what’s on and off the table; and explaining the types of information collected and how it’s translated into team collaboration spaces builds trust in the process. This shared team experience cultivates team cohesion and a sense of belonging.
- They build team self-awareness: The team members shape their own understanding about how they work and helps others understand how to work with you. They codify the team’s culture and how they are likely to use spaces and places; and they understand the links/use cases between how they work and can offer more informed perspectives over time as processes change
- They reduce change management: The team’s lived experiences are seen and heard; and they feel they have contributed to better outcomes; and they come on the journey knowingly and keep us from “designsplaining”
- They set team expectations: Discussion enable teams to create clarity by being more explicit upfront and more intentionally set patterns and expectations of each other; and they now see and support the rationale for space allocations
- They create greater goals and process clarity with the team’s manager: Managers can witness that the majority of workers are – along with more autonomy – accepting more responsibility to each other for their collective performance
Read Part 4: Intentionally design with adaptability in mind
Resources
Future Forum (June 2023) “What Are Team-Level Agreements” https://futureforum.com/2022/06/23/team-level-agreements/
Atlassian. (April 2022) “How team agreements help you navigate the brave new world of hybrid work” https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/team-agreements-examples-and-purpose
