It is helpful to know how to reach someone in the event of a real emergency. It is best to agree in advance on a specific channel or method that is only used in an emergency; it can quickly make people understand that a situation is really urgent. Otherwise, a team – especially a team with support with critical support or functions such as website execution – can develop alert depletion, reducing the likelihood that people will respond to instant message notifications or other means that are overloaded for non-urgent needs. If you inform the team of the number of times someone checks specific time items such as spending approval or reacts to blocking issues, users can plan accordingly. You may want to consider adding a one-line service level (SLA) agreement to your email signature such as: “I check my email twice a day, at 10am and 6pm ET; and skim for emails with [important] every two hours during this period. How do I report team or company emergencies? How can we be contacted in an emergency? Is there anyone on demand? For example, the team may accept that a text or phone call signals the emergency and is only used in such cases. Welcome to the Superpowers Collaboration podcast. My name is Lisette and I interview people and companies that do great things remotely. Welcome to a different episode, each one. Today we are going to talk about team agreements. But first, I would like to announce that I met another 3.0 facilitator at risk of learning. And on July 25th in London, we will offer distance learning. So if you`re curious about what it is, then keep your eyes on the La La SuperPower Collaboration newsletter. We can avoid some fundamental misunderstandings by establishing a team agreement: a set of fundamental expectations for cooperation.

A team agreement describes the type of information we share, how we communicate with each other and how we know what we do to each other. Eliminating time zone dependency for synchronous communication requires some significant changes in the way your team works. For some types of work, this move might be a little easier. Customer support teams with queues for people can easily expect team members to roll in the queue while others roll. Even for more collaborative teams, such as software development, marketing or distribution, studying and interrupting the work to be done can lead to practices such as software developers discovering the starting state so that another developer can get it back when they start working. or a member of the marketing team who provides treatments or feedback on written materials that someone else can review when they are back online. How do we give feedback to each other? How should we report to each other that we are breaking agreement? What do we do if someone systematically violates our agreements? Some teams fight against presumed availability in chat applications like Slack by having an agreed protocol. B, for example, a particular emoji, which is associated with the term “focus mode” when they are technically “available” but do not want to be interrupted.