How to Make Hybrid Working Team Agreements

- Oh man, it's so hot. Working from home has many benefits but sometimes it can get a little tiring, especially when it's as warm as it is right now. It's almost 28 degrees inside this room. So yeah, the office sounds pretty nice right now. You can see that more people are returning to the office right now, but at the same time, they don't want to go to the office five days a week again.

And that's where my favorite way of working, hybrid working, comes into play. In this week's workshop, I will show you how you can make, hybrid working team agreements with your team so that every person in the team, can keep the freedom and flexibility they have right now, but at the same time, you can make agreements about how you want to collaborate and be productive with your team and also hold each other accountable for it.

This is a workshop format that I do in the future proofed writing and a training program helps teams to define their new hybrid way of working, but for you, you can download it for free. You can find the link down below in the description and if you like it, then please also give it a thumbs up because that really helps to grow the Workshop Wednesday, YouTube channel.

So let's jump into Miro, where you can see the hybrid working team agreements workshop. If we zoom out, then you see here, the overview. There are six steps you do with your team and at the end you define some next steps. In the beginning, we check in with the team, we get started and the question is, what's most annoying about not working at an office?

And also the other way around. What's most fun about not working at the office? This sets the mood for the workshop and this helps to reflect on the things that work well and maybe can still be improved. You can also take that into the next steps of the workshop. A check in like this always helps people to learn a little bit if you're doing a workshop but the fun thing about doing workshops like this, is that you can also make it async.

So instead of asking people at the beginning of a workshop to fill this in, this could also be the preparation before the workshop because then they have some more time to think about it and also get to into the mood more and then when you're going into the actual workshop, into the real time meeting with each other, they need less time in the meeting, to achieve better outcomes.

So that's the beginning of the workshop and now let's fast forward to the end, where are we gonna define next steps. Every good team agreement has next steps, where you agree with each other, what experiments you want to try out. So in this case, what three things will you try out in the next two weeks?

Just write the things down over here and then in two weeks from now, you can review them and you can see if you're actually made the progress that you hope to make. Also write down the review date over here so that it's super clear and people can not forget it. And during the workshop, you might discover new topics that you don't have the time to talk about in the meeting time that you have.

So you can write it down over here, just for the next time, that you want to review your team agreements, or maybe in between you want to make some progress on these topics already. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, down below, in every corner, you can see the time box for that activity. So in this case you need two to five minutes for filling this out.

And that's because, during the workshop you already described the things. So this is just a place where you capture and where you reflect on the things you agreed on before. So let's get back to the beginning and we started with step one already. It's also a two to five minute time box and then remote or office, that's step two in the workshop.

And here you want an overview of every team mate's preference when it comes to working at the office or working remote. You can feel in here per team member what their preference are. So in this case, this person wants to work only on Tuesdays at the office and the second team member wants to work at Thursdays or Fridays at the office And now you might be thinking, well isn't this gonna give a lot of trouble?

If people are at the office and other people are not? But we will get to that in the next steps of the workshop. So, it's okay if you don't have overlapping days at the office with some of your teammates. But if you do really as a team, want to have the same day at the office then this can be a great moment to discuss that and to see where everyone's preferences are and to come up with a day that everyone is at the same place.

Now, why it doesn't really matter if you're at the office or remote is because, you want to work async-first. And async-first is something that I described in a previous video already. And the promise there is that, now the office is not the default anymore. Realtime meetings have become even more disruptive and async collaboration is the answer to that.

Async enables you to collaborate and make decisions outside of meetings, by replacing it with text, video, and audio. This way you keep your freedom and flexibility, while still being productive with your team. So you can ask the members of the workshop to watch this video before the actual workshop.

This will also save some time. So send that as preparation, and then in the workshop or maybe already beforehand, they can generate some ideas on what can you stop doing real time? So if you have a lot of meetings, what parts of that meeting can you stop doing real time? Or maybe the whole meeting? And if you want to stop that, then you're also gonna figure out ways, how to start doing that asynchronously.

So what can you do asynchronously? How can you make use of texts, audio and video, to start replacing those meetings? And then the last thing is maybe you're already doing some things really well, what can you continue doing async? This will help you get an overview of the team's preferences and also see where the bottlenecks are right now and now you can decide on experiments that you want to do, to tackle these problems.

After this exercise, you have a great idea of what people want to do real time and what they wanna do async and if they want to move from real time to async, then you can define an experiment in the last step of the workshop where you're actually gonna try out to move one meeting or part of one meeting, to an asynchronous way of working.

And then step four is about communication and collaboration. We're gonna talk about core hours, urgency and availability. Core hours. What hours of the day do you expect from each other to be available to collaborate with each other? And collaboration can be done both real time or asynchronous. And I would suggest two to three hours where you agree with each other that everyone is always available during the day because this makes it easier to wait for someone.

If you have something to ask from them, you can wait because you know, at one o'clock they will be available, instead of disrupting their day and maybe disrupting them at the moment they're with the kids, or they're doing some deep work. So make the core hours green for your team. In this case, I like to do deep work in the morning.

So that's why I like to keep things clean and clear in my calendar and then in the afternoon, I have the core hours to collaborate with others. Now of course, there can be an emergency. So, maybe at eight o'clock or nine o'clock something happens and you really need to work together with someone else to solve that, now, how do we handle urgent things?

And this differs per team. So generate some ideas, what you wanna do, what urgencies could there be for the team, that really can't wait until the core hours and if that's the case, how do we handle those things, while we're down over here, because then you can make agreements with each other. And then the third part is about the availability.

How can others see if you're available? You can use either Slack or Microsoft Teams or any other tool that you use for communication and you can set your status over there. That's usually a nice indicator to show that you're available or not. So make an agreement with each other over here how you wanna do that.

And then we go to step five already. Recurring meetings, and remember that we want to work async-first. So, we want to work with as less meetings as really necessary and if there is really need for a meeting, then we want to come and prepare it, we want to have an agenda and we want to have clear expectations of what would be a successful meeting.

So that's what you wanna do here. And then remember we want to work async-first. You don't always need a meeting to collaborate or make decisions. What you can do over here for your team, write down the recurring meetings. So in this case, a weekly company meeting at Tuesday and then sprint planning and then you go to the next week where you have the sprint review and retrospective.

This is a common rhythm if you work agile or scrum in specific and then per meeting, you can define in this case for the sprint planning I did. So, what needs to be done as preparation and also what the agenda looks like. And if you have written it down over here and agreed upon with each other, then also make sure that you copy and paste it to your calendar insights, because then you always know what to do and everyone is always prepared.

And the pro tip over here, when not everyone is working from the office, make sure that every team member is on their own laptop in meetings. Or, don't do the meeting at all. And what I mean by that is, if six people are of the office and one person is at home, then you do the meeting as if everyone was at home, because that equals the playing field and it makes sure that everyone can understand each other and can see the same.

So don't fall into the trap of how you're used to maybe do your calls in the past, when someone was not at the office. If there's only one person, not at the office, don't make use of one device with six people around it and then the other person trying to understand what they, what is being said, or just missing big parts of the conversation, you want a equal playing field and that probably also means that, when you're at the office, you need different kinds of working spaces, where you are able to have one-on-one conversations or team meetings, but luckily a lot of good parties are already working on that.

I will share something about that in the future as well. But for now, just remember, if one person is not at the office, don't do a call with all the people sitting behind one device, okay? With that out of the way, we go to the sixth step already, accountability and social interactions. Accountability, social interactions and stakeholders.

So accountability. How can we hold each other accountable? What if we don't live up to the agreements? And this is really good to talk about right now, because yeah, it's a new situation. I would work in, we're gonna move from the office to fully remote, to hybrid now. So it's gonna be new again. Yeah.

Some things won't work right away, which is okay, but how can we hold each other accountable? And what do we do if we can't live up to our agreements? It's important to talk about that now, to prevent frustration in the future. And then social interactions, what do you do to bond and build camaraderie with each other?

Camaraderie and this is super important because as you have noticed, when working from home or remote, then it becomes quite lonely. It can become quite lonely if you don't plan for social interactions. So when you do go to an office, I would recommend that you use that time to build camaraderie and to bond with each other, have one-on-one meetings, do some fun things with each other, lunch together, because this way, you will also get to know the people, outside of work and if there's a day, when you're at the office with the whole team together, maybe you have a specific day where everyone is at the office, please don't fall into the pitfall of planning all your meetings at that day because then, it will become tiring pretty quickly and you will loose a lot of the social interactions that happens when being at the same place.

And then one last part which is really important is, how do we work with and inform people outside of the team? It's nice that you have defined your way of working and maybe it's the same as before, maybe it's different. But it's really important to also connect and to bring along the people who are outside of your team because otherwise you will get frustration over there.

So make it clear, maybe create a document where they can see the highlights of how you work as a team and then share it and don't just share it by sending it and saying, well, this is how we work. Have a call with them, talk about it with them because maybe there is some friction and then you work with that friction.

You can figure out an even better way of working, that works for the both of you. So don't forget this step. And then the final part of the workshop is to define the next steps. So what three things will you try out the next two weeks? What are the topics you want to discuss next time? And when it's actually gonna be next time?

And there you have it, in a pretty decent amount of time you have agreements with your team about how you want to work hybrid. And of course, not everything will go smooth right away which is perfectly fine. Talk about it with each other, review your agreements and then improve them over time. Like I said, you can download the template down below in the description, it's the link.

And if you liked this video and you watched all the way to the end, then please give it a thumbs up, because that really helps to grow the channel and to share the Workshop Wednesday knowledge all over the world. Thank you for watching and see you in the next one. Peace.