Work Together Anywhere

CHAPTER 9Tune Your Team with a Team Agreement

“Have a clear process for what you’re trying to achieve. What does the workflow look like? How are decisions going to get made? How are results going to get reported?”

—ROBERT ROGGE, cofounder and CEO, Zingword; cofounder and advisor, Managing Virtual Teams¹

“Teams tend to just start and get going. If you step back and do some brainstorming with your team on how you’re going to work together and how you’re going to communicate, it saves you a lot of trouble.”

—HUGO MESSER, distributed Agile expert and founder, Bridge Global and Ekipa²

Simply put, for remote teams to be successful, they need to establish protocols of how they will work together.

Consider the scenario of an orchestra performing a symphony. All the musicians may play their parts beautifully, but without a previously established agreement regarding the variables of dynamics (volume) and tempo (pace)—and especially whether the instruments are in tune with each other —a cacophony could erupt come curtain time. Just as the orchestra needs to determine in advance what details will produce the best sound, a remote team needs to determine in advance what will produce the best results.

We can “tune” our team by collectively crafting a team agreement. A team agreement delineates all team protocols, including what kinds of information will be shared, how members will communicate with each other, even how to know who is doing what. Essentially, team agreements provide ...