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Working Agreements

Run the Working Agreements Play

Use our Working Agreements Confluence Template

Prep time: 15 minutes

Run time: 60 minutes

No. people needed: 2-10 people

Working agreements are a set of guidelines that teams create together in order to get the best from each other. They define what teammates should expect from each other in pursuit of their team goals. Use this working agreements template to easily run the Working Agreements Play. Created for the Atlassian Team Playbook, the Working Agreements Play is a team exercise that helps lay the foundation for an open and collaborative working environment.
Working agreements is like a contract for how a team wants to be intentional about how they work together. It makes those implicit things you do as a team…explicit! The goal is to create a list of expectations that you can hold each other accountable for so you can work together successfully and avoid misunderstandings around:
  • How you give each other feedback
  • Which tools you use to communicate
  • What meetings you hold as a team
  • How you escalate problems
  • How you will continuously improve as a team
working agreements hero 2x
Today, more than ever, working agreements are desperately needed, because our teams are not necessarily in the same place! According to our 2022 State of Teams report 65% of teams are either hybrid or fully remote, which adds challenges to how we work together. Without being intentional in how we want to work, it’s easy for a team of remote or hybrid team members to drift apart and turn into just a group of individuals going in different directions. If we’re going to accomplish more than any individual can do on their own, we have to figure out how we want to work and collaborate as a team!

If you’ve used the Working Agreement Play in the past, note that we have recently released a new version. The updated Play focuses more on digital tooling and how to enable distributed teams to choose how they will most successfully work together. At Atlassian we are constantly iterating on our practices to respond to changing conditions and improve.

Steps:

Run through each of the below steps in our Working Agreements Play on the Atlassian Team Playbook. You should repeat this play every 3-6 month. Depending on the psychological safety in your team, team members may need a scheduled prompt to feel comfortable sharing that something isn’t working for them. Setting this expectation from the outset also takes the pressure off the team to make the ‘right’ decisions from limited experience, and to adopt a test and learn disposition instead.
  1. Prepare the Working Agreements Confluence Template and share the Working Agreements Play with your team to share context. 5 MIN CONFLUENCE
  2. Pre-work completed by your team members 5 MIN CONFLUENCE
  3. Pre-work completed by your team leader 10 MIN CONFLUENCE
  4. Set the stage by setting meeting behavioral standards and silently reading through the draft document together. 5 MIN CONFLUENCE LIVE MEETING
  5. Establish communication channels. 10 MIN LIVE MEETING
  6. Establish meetings. 30 MIN LIVE MEETING
  7. Commit to your escalation management process. 10 MIN LIVE MEETING
  8. Discuss how you will enable continuous improvement. 10 MIN LIVE MEETING

If you have feedback or want to share success stories, we want to hear from you! Join us in the Teamwork Lab community!

And be sure to check out the Atlassian University course How to shape effective teams. You'll get facilitation guides, detailed overviews of how to run each play, and solutions to common challenges.

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