Developing Smart Working Team Agreement‌) is designed to help teams develop their own agreements around new ways of working as organisations go through transformational change towards Smart Working.

It is divided into 4 sections:

  • Where and when we work
  • How we work together
  • New ways to collaborate
  • How we share space in the office.

It works better following a ‘Smart Working 101’ session where people explore their ways of working and how the activities involved can be done on a more flexible and mobile basis. Usually, organisations already have a set of high-level principles or protocols about new ways of working: this session will be about how to apply these to the team.

The template then helps them think through ‘what good looks like’ in their area of work, and the benefits they can achieve while supporting wellbeing and team cohesion.

An approach that works is to have an initial facilitated session with a team – or with representatives when dealing with larger groups – to start on the agreements, then participants go away to reflect and chat with colleagues, then a second session to finalise.

The key is to get people thinking in innovative ways about the benefits they can achieve and avoid arrangements that are not clearly focused on business needs, e.g. rotating days to work at home or having core hours that are not related to service delivery needs.