[MUSIC PLAYING] MARK CRUTH: In this video, you're going to learn, What is the Working Agreements Play?, the pre-work necessary to run the Play, guidance and tips on how to facilitate the Play and how you should follow-up after running the Play. When asked what's the one thing I recommend a team do to help improve the way they collaborate, I always answer, create a working agreement. I think of working agreements as a great way to help make those implicit things that we assume in terms of how we work together very explicit, things like, how do we give each other feedback? 

What tools do we use to communicate? How do we run our meetings? How do we escalate problems? And most importantly, how do we improve as a team? The focus here is actually creating a list of expectations that as a team we can hold each other accountable for, so that way, we can be successful and avoid things like misunderstandings at the end of the day. 

Here's a fact. 65% of team members are either working hybrid or fully remote, and there are a ton of challenges that come to bringing together teams in those type of environments. And if we really want to unleash the potential of teams and create things that are bigger than just any one person can create, we've got to be intentional with how we work together. Whether you're a new team or a team that's been together for years, having that shared understanding of how you want to collaborate together in a working agreement is critical to your success. 

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All right, it's almost time to run the Play. There's a couple things I want you to keep in mind, and there's a couple things you need to do before you get started. First, make sure you consider the space and how you want people to connect. I usually recommend we do things like use the Confluence template for working agreements. There's a great tool to actually be able to go out there and have people fill out information. 

Second, before you actually go into the session, you want your team members to fill out some information on how they like to work. What's their ideal working environment? How do they like to work? What hours do they work? How do they like to receive feedback? And if there's anything else they'd like to provide, they give us context on how they like to work or collaborate with each other. 

And third, as a facilitator, you've got some homework, too. Go out there and learn about how the team is actually communicating. What are those communication channels? What do meetings look like, and what's the current escalation process? Your goal is to gather what they do today and populate it in the template. 

Now, here's a tip. Don't add too many details in terms of how those things work. The more fleshed-out and formal it looks, the more likely the team is going to think it's fully baked and they can't change it. Now, before we begin, one reminder. Click down on the link below to actually access the Working Agreements Play from the Atlassian Team Playbook and follow along. 

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All right, so it's time to run our Working Agreements Play. First, let's consume the information we've already added to our Working Agreements page. This is all that free work we did. The way I like to do this is to basically take 10 minutes for people to do some review on their own. What this does-- it allows the team to have a shared understanding of what the content currently says so we can move forward into the next section. 

After the silent review, we can now start the conversation. Start out reviewing the Team Preferences section. Here, what I like to do is review any comments or questions that were left around people's working agreements. Have some conversation, but keep it light. The whole idea is not necessarily to go deep here. But just make sure everyone's on the same page. 

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Next, it's time to review the remaining sections. For each of these sections, I usually timebox things, so about 15 minutes each. Now, as you're going through each section, I have a couple tips I want to share with you. First, if you find yourself in a situation where maybe the conversation needs some more brainstorming, you need to get more of those generative ideas, I typically like to move my team over into some sort of whiteboarding tool at that point. 

We can use the Sticky Note functionality to just rapidly brainstorm, consolidate and ultimately vote on our top items that we want included in our working agreement. From there, what I'll do is actually then just translate those over into the Confluence page right then and there. The second tip I have for you has to do with how we agree and align on our working agreements. 

I like to allow teams the option to vote instead of two ways, an "I agree" and "Disagree," but vote in three ways. In this way, when we vote, we say, hey, do you agree? I can say, I'm indifferent, and then 3 being, I disagree. 

And for disagree in this case, it has to be really intentional, and it has to say, I disagree because I think what we're putting in here is actually going to hurt our team. This will prevent the team from necessarily getting wrapped around the axle and kind of going down rabbit holes of word-smithing and things like that, when really, the intent is to focus on that path forward and saying, is this good enough for us to start? 

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All right. Now that we've reviewed the sections, let's take a step back and look at our working agreement. At this point, I usually do one final vote, be able to find out is, do we all agree that this is our working agreement? So I'll ask everyone. 

On the count of 3, vote. They can give me a thumbs up. Yes, I agree. I want to move forward with this. 

And give me a sideways thumb, saying, I'm indifferent. I'm not going to stand in the way, but I think this is good enough to move forward. Or they can give me a thumbs down, saying, I think there's a problem here we need to address. 

So if you get any thumbs down, what you need to do is you're going to take some time to resolve those issues. Once you've resolve those issues and everyone's on the same page, it's time to celebrate. You've got your working agreement. 

Now the fun part starts, actually putting that working agreement to use. So I've got a couple of final tips I want to share with you in terms of what you do now that you have your working agreement. Tip number 1, make sure you're working agreement is visible. 

For you, you want to put it up front and center for your team. So I usually like to put it right on my home page with a link to it. So that way, if I ever need to refer to it within my team, it's easy to find. 

Second, make sure you update your practices to reflect what you agreed to in your working agreement. Actually make sure someone has the action to make those changes to the practices that we follow, and then update the team at regular staff meetings on how things are going. The goal here is to actually put those changes in place and then reflect later on. Is that helping? 

And three, use your working agreement. This is what your team agreed to in terms of your ways of working. So if you start to see patterns that are contrary to your ways of working, actually call it out and ask, should we change it? 

Working agreements are, again, one of my favorite Plays, and it's something that every team should have because it helps us be intentful with how we work together. And the thing I want you to remember is that working agreements are living, breathing documents, meaning they're going to change over time, and they should change. So I recommend that every three months or so, your team should review your working agreement and make any changes to it. As your ways of working evolve, we want our working agreements to evolve right along with them. 

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