Forming new teams can be a challenge in a remote environment – especially if the folks on the new team have never worked together before. Whenever a new team is established (see Formally Established Teams) I like to run a workshop – or series of workshops – to kick things off. The exact format of these will depend on the team and the work they’re going to do, but when I run them I like to start by focussing on three things first.
- Get mutual understanding of what we need from each other to do our best work.
- Understand our team vision and mission.
- Define our team principles, what they mean and how we use them to guide our daily decision-making.
The Team Forming Workshop 🎨
This format works best with small teams of 5-8. I tend to use Fundamental Workshopping Tools along with a simple FigJam board (see 
Opening (5-10 mins)
Doing our best work (75 mins)
This is about helping the team identify their own needs and behaviour as individuals, and then discussing and acknowledging them as a group.
What do I need to do my best work in a team?
- What do I struggle with? What am I bad at?
- What frustrates others when working with me?
- What tends to derail me (either internal or external)
This usually ends up with some interesting insight but can can feel quite uncomfortable for some people. As the facilitator, it’s a good idea to thank everyone for their honesty and let people take a 10-minute break at this point.
Team Operating Principles (60 mins)
As a group, look back over the sticky notes from earlier and try to identify any commonalities and potential solutions to these. Sometimes this involves members of the team just agreeing to help others work on something, but often there are some very practical practices the team can adopt to do help with these.
If some of the team members find it hard to get going in the morning, we might agree to always start the day with a synchronous stand-up, or that we’ll always spend the first hour of the day pairing with each other (see Pair Working).
If folks struggle with decision paralysis or knowing what to work on, we might all agree to be very disciplined about breaking work into smaller tasks and keeping our project management software up-to-date.
Whatever comes out of these discussions, it’s a good idea to spend some time writing them down clearly, either as principles or values, agreed ways of working or perhaps as a charter which everyone commits to.
I’ve found that this part of the workshop is always quite messy, and there’s no “right” way to facilitate it.
Once the team has agreed on these operating principles, I always ask the question “If we do these things, are we all getting what we need from each other to do our best work as a team?”
Vision & Mission (max 15 mins)
I usually wrap up the workshop with a short section on the team vision and mission. Most of the time, these will be set by someone outside the team (you should know why you’re standing up a team before you do). So this part usually just involves someone painting a picture of the future and explaining why the team exists, and then clearly stating the team’s immediate mission.
If the team have any questions or suggestions about the mission, we might spend some time tweaking.
Ending on vision & mission isn’t necessary, but I’ve found it helps to anchor the other work in the workshop back to the work to be done, and is a good springboard for moving into planning meetings and the like.
Closing (5 mins)
Why does this format work? 🤔
I think because…
- It forces all team members to step slightly outside their comfort zone. The shared experience of being slightly uncomfortable together makes it much easier when it (inevitably) happens in the future and feel okay about it. This is especially valuable if the team has senior people on it, who wouldn’t normally share uncomfortableness with the other members.
- It asks folks to be open, vulnerable and honest from the start – all of which are important in high-functioning teams.
- It helps people see and acknowledge that we’re all different and have different needs.
- It’s a good introduction to individual reflection, which most of us don’t do nearly enough. It’s very hard for a team to honestly reflect on their work together if they can’t reflect as individuals. (These kind of workshops can lead to deeper retros later on)
- The act of working together to turn individual needs and failings into jointly owned principles really helps folks take ownership of how we do work and not just the work itself. We’re starting to design our team together.