Practice : Shared Team Working Agreements
Purpose and Strategic Importance
Shared Team Working Agreements are collaboratively created sets of norms and expectations that guide how teams communicate, collaborate, and make decisions. These agreements foster trust, reduce misunderstandings, and create a safe environment where all voices are respected.
This practice is essential for high-performing Agile teams, as it builds a foundation for effective teamwork, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Description of the Practice
- Working agreements cover communication styles, meeting behaviours, conflict resolution, and decision-making protocols.
- They are created and updated collectively by the team, ensuring buy-in and relevance.
- Agreements are visible and referenced regularly in team ceremonies.
- They support psychological safety by setting clear expectations for respectful interaction.
- The agreements evolve as the team matures and as context changes.
How to Practise It (Playbook)
1. Getting Started
- Facilitate a dedicated workshop or retrospective to co-create initial working agreements.
- Use prompts like “How do we want to communicate?” or “What behaviours help us succeed?”
- Document the agreements clearly and make them visible to all team members.
- Review and revisit agreements regularly to keep them relevant.
2. Scaling and Maturing
- Encourage new team members to participate in updating agreements.
- Link agreements to team values and organisational culture.
- Use agreements to guide conflict resolution and improve meeting effectiveness.
- Reflect on agreements during retrospectives to identify needed changes.
3. Team Behaviours to Encourage
- Refer to agreements when challenges or disagreements arise.
- Actively practice the behaviours and norms defined in the agreements.
- Hold each other accountable respectfully when agreements are breached.
- Celebrate when agreements help the team succeed or improve.
4. Watch Out For…
- Agreements becoming static documents that are ignored or forgotten.
- Lack of genuine team involvement in creating or updating agreements.
- Agreements being imposed top-down rather than co-created.
- Using agreements as punitive tools rather than enablers.
5. Signals of Success
- Teams reference working agreements naturally during collaboration.
- Psychological safety improves as team members feel heard and respected.
- Meetings and communication become more effective and inclusive.
- Teams adapt agreements to new challenges without friction.
- Conflicts are resolved constructively using shared norms.