Skip to content
Skip to main content
header search
ahihi OpenLearn
OpenLearn
Menu
sticky search

About this free course

Become an OU student

Download this course

Share this free course

Course content Course content
Hybrid working: digital communication and collaboration
Hybrid working: digital communication and collaboration

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

More free courses

4 Team working agreements

Before exploring communication and collaboration further, understanding the context in which you work is key to good communication. This is especially true if you are part of a team, as how you communicate and collaborate is an extension of both your team and your organisation, so you need to be mindful of how you operate.

A useful approach for hybrid working, if you are part of specific team/group of people, is to create a ‘team working agreement’ together, focused on your expectations of how you collaborate and communicate. Without the opportunities that being in the office together enable, agreeing how you want to work becomes even more important.

In the video below, Lisette Sutherland, director of Collaboration Superpowers, discusses how to keep the feeling and sense of a team when hybrid working, and she explains the purpose and benefit of creating a ‘team working agreement’.

Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_6_2022_sept102_team_working_agreement_compressed.mp4
Copy this transcript to the clipboard
Print this transcript
Show transcript | Hide transcript

Transcript

LISETTE SUTHERLAND:
How do we keep the feeling, that sense of team, when we're all over the place? So, some people are at home, and some people are at the office. And in some ways, it was easier during the pandemic when everybody was remote because it levelled the playing field a little bit. And now that we're going hybrid, it's like herding cats. You've got some people in the office and some people at home. And now teambuilding has to evolve to match this new multimodal way of working.
I just recently sent out a survey as I'm building a new course on hybrid leadership, because that's clearly – I feel like leadership, the leaders in hybrid organisations, are the ones that are having to make the biggest transition right now because leading in a hybrid way is very different than leading in person or remote.
So, I've been studying a lot about leadership. And the question that I asked to my mailing list was, what is the number one thing that you're challenged with right now as a leader in your organisation? And it came back, by and large without a doubt, it's personal connections and that sense of team. So, we know that this is the one place that people are suffering and just really creating personal connections.
And what I always say around this is connection happens when we pay attention to each other. So, the key to building personal connections in a hybrid environment is finding new ways of paying attention to each other. The other thing to consider, though, is to take a step back and to really start to think about, well, what is it that your team needs in order to feel connected? Because it's very different for people.
For example, some people come to work because they're excited about solving challenging problems. They want to dive in and solve things. Other people come to work because they like the people that they work with. It's like more important to them who they work with than what they're working on. And still others come to work, it's just a job. And it's fine. They like their jobs fine. But at the end of the day, they go home. It's just a job. They turn off, and they go back to their families or whatever else that they're interested in.
And so, when you're thinking about teambuilding, you have to really understand your team's intrinsic motivations for coming to work to begin with, and what do they need to feel connected? Because, if you're a leader in an organisation, and you're busy building teambuilding sessions, like pizza parties and quiz nights and fun things for people to do, you may not be hitting at what people need to feel connected on the team to begin with.
So, I would say, take a step back, really understand what is your team's intrinsic motivation for being there, and then you can build an environment for teambuilding that matches what they need to feel connected.
A really wonderful tool for doing this comes from the Management 3.0 community, and it's a game – or it's really a card game called Moving Motivators. And it's very simple. You just take your top 10 intrinsic motivations. I can actually show you. I've got the set of cards right here. You take these cards, and each card has an intrinsic motivator on it, so this one's relatedness, or freedom, or mastery.
And then you order the cards, in order from the thing that motivates you the most to the thing that motivates you the least, and then you have a conversation about it with your team. And it's absolutely fascinating what comes out in these conversations. And you can get a really good understanding of that.
So, one, start by understanding what does your team need to begin with, because there are some teams that are not into team building at all. I interviewed a company once who had a team that they never met. They never spoke. They did everything through a ticketing system. And they didn't have teambuilding. And they didn't want teambuilding. So, there are teams out there that are like that.
So, start with that. And then the next thing that I would say is, we want to make team building multi-modal. And what I mean by that is you don't want to just have activities happening in the office or activities happening online. You want to have a variety of activities at any given point of time. And one of the new roles that seems to be emerging after the pandemic is the role of a remote office manager or a remote team leader.
And I like this idea because when we had the physical office as a headquarters, we often had an office manager, somebody who made sure that coffee was there, and people's birthdays got celebrated and things got organised. The same holds true for online or in a hybrid environment.
We want to have somebody who is remembering birthdays and organising teambuilding activities in a variety of ways and just making sure that people stay connected, because if you leave it up to the individual, we're all busy with our own work. And probably you're going to need a variety of individuals to organise this. But you need somebody to head it up and to lead that.
So, those are sort of two starting things, I would say, to start by understanding what your team needs, and then make sure you're doing multi-modal teambuilding activities in between. On top of that, though, there is the organisational side of just being a team.
And so, for that, we can dive probably more into this in a bit, but for that I would say, one of the things about team building and what we know about trust on a remote team, is that it's built on reliability, consistency, and responsiveness. So, you need to create an environment in which you can build reliability, consistency, and responsiveness.
So, in order to do that, we start by creating agreements for how we're going to work together. And that's just basic, like what information are we going to share? How are we going to communicate? How do we know how each other are doing? And then we build regular feedback loops.
So, agile software teams have retrospectives once every week or once every two weeks. And it's not about the work. It's more on how they're doing as a team. And I think the number one thing that leaders can do there is creating a team agreement together for defining what is normal behaviour for our team.
So, there's a there's an exercise that we start with. One is creating – we start with defining what are the company values because I know it sounds like it's just going to be one of those motivational posters that we hang on the wall, and everybody walks by, and yeah, yeah, there's no I in team, yeah, yeah.
But, in fact, values and our culture at a company is how we behave when the boss isn't looking. So, it's actually really important to define our company values because it helps guide people in what their behaviour is going to be. If you have a company value of transparency, then that does guide you on how to behave. You would want to ask your question in an open forum or post your file in a public place if the company value is transparency, for example.
For example, another example is that my company, one of our values is fairness. I have 50-plus facilitators, who are also giving workshops all around the world. Some of them are close friends of mine. And they pay an annual license fee. And of course, when it comes time to renew their license, they'll ask for a discount because they're good friends. So, they feel free to do that. But because our value is fairness, my whole team knows that the answer is no because we treat all of our facilitators the same, so we treat everybody exactly fairness. And that builds trust within the community.
So, if you're building a team agreement, definitely the company values is where you want to start. And that does inform decision-making behaviour. And then you want to talk about, where is the information stored? Are there security protocols that we need to follow? One of the biggest things that people complain about is not being able to find information or duplicating work that already exists.
And some of the statistics out there show that we spend one to two hours a day looking for stuff. So, that's actually a pretty important part of team cohesion, is actually defining where the information is stored and what are the protocols around that.
The second would be communication. What are the expected response times? Some people are instantaneous responders on email. I'm 24 hours at best. If it's really important, I can do it. But I batch my emails. I just get so many. So, it's just important for your team to define that. Or, also, if the boss sends an email on the weekend, does that mean you have to answer it? How responsive do we need to be? What are the working hours?
So, all these questions sound really simple. But when you're when you're with a hybrid team, everybody's got different ways of being productive and different times of day when they're productive. It's like herding cats. So, you actually should define a little bit what are the basic operating procedures.
And then the last thing that I always add to the team agreement is the wellbeing. What do we need to take care of ourselves and our team in order to have a sustainable way of working? During the pandemic, productivity was not an issue. Globally, worldwide, people were measuring productivity. We did not have a decrease in productivity. But we did have a huge increase in burnout because people's work and lives were blending so much, and we're also stuck at home, and the stress of the pandemic as well.
But mostly, it's people's works and lives are blending so much that we were working ourselves to death during the pandemic. So, burnout is much more of an issue. So, in terms of team agreements, it's really good to – like on my team, we've established that we don't work on the weekends. You can if you want. But there's no expectation that anybody else on the team will be around. So, if you need to get a message to somebody, then the emergency channel on the weekend would be the WhatsApp group. But that's really in case of an emergency.
But every team really needs to work through these things, otherwise it can be a 24/7 bombardment of email. And the alignment that you normally have when you're in person, needs to be done in a different way. And that, in a hybrid environment, is usually done through documentation and agreements like this for how to sort of normalise team behaviour.
End transcript
Download
 
Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).

Activity 14 Create your own team working agreement

Timing: Read through steps: 10 minutes. Creation of agreement: Outside of the course study time with your team, allow 2–3 hours

In this activity you will have the opportunity to explore how team working agreements can be created, and we take you through the steps to do this. This is an activity you may prefer to do once you have finished the course; in Step 4 there are links to further guidance for creating you team working agreement.

Step 1: What communication channels do you have?

Consider the primary channels of communication within your organisations. Review the list below and make a note of what these are within your own organisation and how you use them in your team.

The following are considered the primary channels of communication in a workplace:

  1. In person

  2. Documents

    For example, can include:

    • Company and HR policy documents
    • Benefits forms
    • Legal guidelines

  3. Emails

  4. Instant messaging platforms

  5. Video conference

  6. Phone calls

  7. Social media.

Step 2: How effective are these channels?

Consider how effective the management of communication channels is within your organisation and team and whether they enable the following. Make a note of what works well and what might require improvement.

The primary channels of communication are important, as they deliver communication in an instant and timely manner, which ensures:

  1. All team members receive the same information
  2. Employees know what is expected of them
  3. Discussion, feedback and interaction
  4. Opportunities for employees to make suggestions and voice concerns or questions
  5. Stronger relationships between employees.

Step 3: What communication channels are best?

Read the article from Gartner (Wiles, 2017), ‘How to choose the right communication channel’ [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , and take time to look at the table within the article which helps you consider – How does your target audience like to consume information?

The article was written in 2017. Consider how you communicate now. Are there better ways and tools available to you for communicating and collaborating now?

Step 4: Create your ‘team working agreement’

Lisette Sutherland is an expert in remote working and collaboration, and she has provided a freely available ‘Facilitator's guide’ with tips, step-by-step instructions and resources to help you run a meeting with your team to create a ‘team working agreement’. The following extract provides the context:

‘This meeting agenda template helps remote teams create a “working team agreement.” This is a living document that sets expectations and captures agreements about how a remote team will work together. Together, you'll establish a basic set of guidelines for working together, to remove costly misunderstandings.

‘During this meeting, you'll lead the group through a series of questions that explore everyone's preferences and expectations. Then, you'll work together to create your team agreement.’

(Sutherland, n.d.).

Download the ‘Lucid Facilitator’s Guide: Create a Remote Team Working Agreement’, and review the process within it. If you feel it is a tool that would benefit how you work as a team, and you are comfortable facilitating a meeting, work with your team to create a ‘Team Working Agreement’.

You can download the guide from Lucid website at the link below.

You may also like to explore this article that provides further information and a podcast on how to create your agreement:

Digital wellbeing

Digital wellbeing is an important topic. You should bear in mind the wellbeing of your team members and other people you communicate or collaborate with digitally, as well as your own wellbeing.

You organisation may have guidance that you can refer to, and the course Hybrid Working: wellbeing and inclusion within the ‘Supporting hybrid working and digital transformation’ collection explores digital wellbeing further.