Have your ‘team norms’ been forgotten? Here are 6 ways to ensure they get put into practice
By Katherine Lewis
Creating team norms, or jointly agreed-upon operating principals, is a great way to bridge different styles and perspectives among team members. Norms make cultural values and expectations explicit and establish clear guidelines that shape how co-workers will interact and how work will get done.
But one thing I see happening with many teams is that they do the work to come up with team norms (and it can be a lot of work), but then don’t use them effectively or consistently. It’s one thing to say your team is going to prioritize, for instance, assuming positive intent or being open to change. It’s another to put that into practice and allow the ideas to come to fruition in a measurable way. Let me show you how to harness the power of team norms and keep them top of mind.
1. Put team norms in writing and make them visible. Write down your norms and keep them in a central location. Also post your agreed up norms in your meeting space. If your team is hybrid or virtual, consider creating icons representing your norms that will appear on each member’s Zoom screen. Find a way to make sure everyone has access to your norms and reviews them regularly. How many norms should a team have? Some research suggests more than three is hard to keep track of, but a lot of teams I work with have as many as five. And that’s OK if that’s what they agree upon; it should be up to each team.
2. Start every meeting by reading norms aloud. Reminding everyone of what they agreed upon together not only helps members recall exactly what the team norms are, but it makes them more engaged with the team’s purpose and enhances feelings of trust and safety. Research published inHarvard Business Review shows that having a sense of purpose and feeling a sense of trust enhances the production of the oxytocin in the brain, and the extended release of oxytocin increases job satisfaction.
3. Challenge your team with a quiz. If your team likes friendly competition, you can also start meetings with a fun test: See how many people can recite all the norms without looking. This motivates everyone to truly commit them to memory.
4. Assess progress. Set aside time at the end of meetings – about 30 minutes each month or a shorter time each week – to check in and see how well the team is upholding its norms. One way is to have a big scorecard with the norms on the left and the dates of your meetings across the top. For each norm, members score themselves on how well they’ve been upholding that principle. This allows everyone to judge progress over time. The next step would be for everyone to rate the team overall and come to a consensus about how well the team as a whole is upholding its norms.
5. Take turns being the steward. Rotate the job of reading aloud the norms, making sure they are posted somewhere and implementing the action steps necessary to review the norms and assess how well the team is using them. You might start by having someone in human resources be the steward, but make sure everyone on the team feels ownership and takes on this role at some point.
6. Reference norms when giving feedback. If you are trying to hold fellow team members accountable, rely on your norms to have those more difficult conversations and increase team effectiveness. For instance, if you have a norm that states “All voices are heard,” and you feel some on the team haven’t been speaking up, remind them of the shared agreement around this norm.
I hope you’ve found these tips useful for unleashing the power of norms. Jointly agreed-upon norms bring about higher productivity because they allow for the best ideas to surface and a more efficient use of time – or what author Stephen M.R. Covey (son of author Stephen R. Covey) calls the “speed of trust.” Once you have that, things happen faster.