Great Expectations (and Sound Agreements): Establishing Virtual Team Norms
As news of quarantine extensions come, a lot of us are realizing that there’s no other way to describe this remote work reality as the “new normal”. Moreso, a lot of managers and executives are even opting to push the remote work reality further than the advised quarantine period for purposes of health and safety. Consequently, teams are now working to get used to this new reality. In team development language, these teams may now be going into the Norming stage.
Photo by Marvin Meyer from Unsplash.com
In Tuckman’s team development stages, Norming may be described as the stage where members are getting used to each other and developing trust and productivity together. This is done by practicing good and open communication between each member of the team, and establishing certain expectations and agreements on the way the team works. For example, a virtual team may want to talk about how meetings should be conducted and agree on meeting procedures (e.g. signals for speaking, one person talking at a time, etc.).
In the given example, creating agreements will give the time a guide on how to participate and contribute when in a virtual meeting. Whenever a new task or process is introduced to a team, there will be a need for a team to establish ground rules on dealing with it. A good team will be able to handle changes like these, whether drastic or not, because they’ll be able to talk about it and agree on how to deal with it.
For co-located teams, making the move to a virtual space means big changes. Your team may have been performing exceptionally well working physically next to each other, but going remote means some of the working agreements and expectations the team had may no longer be applicable.
How to go through norming
It’s not exactly rocket science to go through norming. All a team needs is some guidance and process to discuss and agree on team norms. You can follow these steps whenever you see an opportunity for establishing a team norm:
Recall the incident or situation. The very first thing to do is to get the members to talk about what happened. It may be as simple as an online meeting that took too long, or missed deadlines. The members can also talk about a situation they found beneficial to the team. By doing so, the members can establish for themselves what worked and what didn’t. It is important to note that the goal of this step is to see how the team can do things better, and not to throw blame around. In early stages of new realities, it is important to balance productivity with learning/adjusting. Mistakes will happen, but the team needs to talk about it to improve!
Get everyone to share ideas on dealing with the situation. Once everyone has identified what worked and what can be improved, gather ideas on concrete steps/actions that the team could do the next time. If the incident being discussed is negatively affecting productivity, the actions may be about preventing what happened, to how to deal with it properly if it happens again. If the incident is positively contributing to the team, the actions may be about how to inspire it further. You can do a simple “Do’s and Don’t’s” chart with your team for this!
Get everyone’s agreement on what will be done moving forward. Once the ideas for actions are given, get everyone to review it and ask for their further feedback. If there are none, get everyone to agree to what has been discussed. It may be a simple step, but it is crucial that each team member agrees to the norms. Norms only hold power if the team accepts and applies it.
Document agreements. It’s always wise to get agreements down to a document that everyone can refer to. You may not always bring up the document, but it would be good if everyone has access to it if they wish to see it. For one, it helps get each member hold everyone else accountable to what was agreed on. Another useful aspect of this is when the team wishes to revisit the norm and make some changes to it (which may be prompted by another change the team is dealing with). For virtual teams, you can use collaborative online documents (such as Google Docs) to track these agreements!
Everybody holds each other accountable. Apply your team norms! There would be no other point in discussing what should be done if the team does not practice it!
There will always be moments where a team will find itself in a new territory or reality. It is quite common for teams to experience frustration and tension when these moments come, however, keep in mind that a good team can always discuss and agree on what to do to improve the situation. Keep watching out for those opportunities to discuss with your team how to work better together -- onwards to high performance!