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working agreement

Also called: team agreement, team charter, working agreements

A short written set of rules the team agrees on together: response times, which channel is for what, when people are reachable, how hand-offs and absences work. The team reviews it when it stops matching how work actually happens.

A working agreement is a short written set of rules a team agrees on about how it works together: how fast people reply, which channel is for what, when people are reachable, how work is handed over at the end of a shift or during an outage, and how the team disagrees. It covers the team's relations with itself, not only what the lead expects from each person (that is a separate, two-way list of expectations).

It matters most in distributed teams, where nobody overhears how things are done. Unwritten rules are read differently by each person, and the gaps show up as tickets nobody picked up and quiet resentment. Rules people helped write are also rules they defend: a draft made together in one meeting, with written comments from anyone who can't join live, tends to be followed far more than a memo from the lead.

Keep it to a handful of lines, each concrete enough that two people read it the same way: "a first reply within 45 minutes on shift", not "reply promptly". Set numbers from how the work actually runs, so a rule doesn't quietly punish one person whose job differs. Try it for a month, then review it, and change it whenever it stops matching how work really happens. It is a tool for the team, not a disciplinary checklist.

Example

In late January Klasna's Support team drafted its first agreement. The hardest line was the first-reply time: 30 minutes or 45?

The team looked at December–January, eight weeks of each coordinator's weekly median first reply:

Coordinator
Lowest week, min
Highest week, min
Weeks above 30 min
Taras
9
13
0 of 8
Olha
11
16
0 of 8
Maryna
14
19
0 of 8
Bohdan
32
39
8 of 8

A 30-minute rule would have flagged Bohdan every single week, although only 3.72% of his tickets reopen; his first half hour often goes into checking the account properly. At 45 minutes every coordinator's weekly median was inside the line in all eight weeks. A median is the middle reply of a week, so some replies were slower; the rule is checked on tickets, not on medians.

The final lines: "On shift, a new customer message gets a first reply within 45 minutes." "Urgent: the team chat with a tag; everything else: the ticket thread." "If your power or connection goes, post your open tickets in the team chat as soon as you can; whoever is on shift picks them up." "We disagree in the thread or on a call, never in front of a family." Review: in one month.

Common mistakes

  • The lead writes it alone and sends it round. A memo gets read; a rule the team drafted gets defended.
  • Vague lines. "Be responsive" means ten minutes to one person and a day to another; put a number or a concrete action in every line.
  • Numbers set from wishes or from the fastest person. A rule that fails one solid performer every week measures the rule, not the person.
  • Forgetting remote reality. Time zones, power and connection outages and hand-overs between shifts need their own lines.
  • Never reviewing it, or using it as a stick. Review after a month; it describes how the team works, it isn't a tool for tracking people.

Learn it in the course