Now that you know the basics, here are some examples of clauses you can include in your team agreement. Some of them are specific to agile teams. Steve starts asking for proposed deals in his first area of interest: the daily Scrum start time. After all possible working arrangements, he uses the Decider[2] protocol to quickly seek consensus. If there is no immediate consensus, the person who said “no” to an idea suggests what they think is a better idea. When several people have a problem, everyone is supposed to offer a better idea. If too many people say no, the applicant should consider withdrawing the proposal. In the case of Steve`s team, the team has its first working arrangements after 20 minutes: when the team saw this graph, they knew it described their behavior. They realized and accepted that they had to change as a team. The team summarizes all the individual agreements in the work agreement and displays them on the wall of the team room. In the months that follow, team members slowly get used to reminding their colleagues of behaviors that don`t respect the agreement.
Every few sprints, Steve asks in a retrospective: “Is this still our working agreement? Is there anything you`d like to change? The list evolves as team members find other areas where they see benefits. After six months, they are much more able to cope with tense problems within the team or when the pressure from the outside increases on them. For personal teams, find a whiteboard or large piece of paper and place sticky notes and markers in a meeting room. If it`s a new team, it may need a new team name. And this could be added in the context of logistics. Ask team members to think about these questions during the start-up phase of a team. It works well in person and digitally. Have participants write each wish on a (virtual) tights with a five-minute time box. Either share the wishes through bingo moderation, or ask participants to group all duplicates directly and place similar points next to each other to reflect the weight of similar desires. Look at them together, discuss the details and ask those present: After studying the survey results, I interviewed the nine teammates individually.
During the interviews, I learned several dysfunctions of teamwork. A number of teammates commented on the tendency of several other teammates to “explode” when frustrated. I called the behavior: Steve then hosts a retrospective to help the team and the product owner come together to solve some of their problems. During the process, they discuss the friction they felt in previous sprints. They agree to create a working agreement, and since it will probably last more than an hour, they choose to make it an action point for the next Sprint retrospective. Work arrangements are a simple and powerful way to create explicit guidelines on the type of work culture you want for your team. They remind everyone how to engage in respectful behavior and communication. In this article, we`ll help you understand why these agreements are useful and how you can help your team create their own.
One year after their working arrangements were established, the team presented the following results to its senior management team. Work arrangements create transparency and clarity so that teams can release the energy that would be spent on conflicts and focus on their work. In addition, team agreements offer the same value for remote teams as they do for personal teams. The discussion of a remote team agreement has now gained momentum, as all families work together from home. This is a new category of remote work that requires a little more empathy than in 2017. Your teamwork agreement must be easily accessible and maintainable for all team members. It`s easy to forget something you`ve only seen once in a meeting. Find creative ways to consistently incorporate the key points of your agreement into your team`s focus. One way to do this is to create some kind of mural in the main workspace where the instructions will be displayed. For Scrum teams, Scrum events can have additional meaning and relevance in these distributed times. The Daily Scrum is a point of interaction at the beginning of the day, a way to agree on expectations for the day ahead.
Sprint scheduling is a similar way to set expectations, albeit with a larger work queue. Sprint reviews are opportunities for feedback from stakeholders and sprint retrospectives are a way to review and adapt the way we work. These working methods could include remote team agreements. Do you have agreed contact persons in your team or contact channels? For example, can team members redirect requests somewhere if they are interrupted? After all, the teammates were happy and productive. In addition, their leaders and the team`s customers were also satisfied. .