In this video Diana Larsen and Neal Taylor discuss the working agreements, how to facilitate them during a Liftoff, and which activities could follow on if needed
What are working agreements?
Here we attempt to create the best conditions for working together as a team. We want to find an agreement between us.
Working agreements refer to work that happens on a daily basis; routine work (and also our attempts to try to avoid some pet peeves!) but note that these should be aspirational. These agreements shouldn’t need to cover things that we are already doing.
As the team improves, agreements will become implicit or second nature, and can be replaced with new agreements. For this reason, these agreements are very likely to change over time.
How to facilitate during a Liftoff?
Introduce the topic by giving some context that we need to know how to work together on a daily basis.
Get statements from each of the team members by encouraging them to complete the sentence, “We work best together when …”
Facilitate the discussion about ‘what are these topics really about’ (punctuality, approach, etc). Through this discussion, try to find about five agreements that can get the team going.
Potential follow on activities
Following on, facilitators can potentially integrate the following activities depending on team needs and time:
- Scheduling a time to review the working agreements (during a future retrospective).
Further reading
For more information, join an upcoming workshop.