Every team has ways of working. The question is whether those ways are intentional or accidental. In most teams, norms evolve informally: someone starts doing something, others follow, and over time a habit becomes an unwritten rule. This works fine until it does not. New joiners do not know the rules. Existing members have different interpretations. Friction builds because people are operating on assumptions rather than agreements. Defining your team's ways of working is not bureaucracy. It is the foundation that makes collaboration predictable, fair, and efficient.
Documented norms do not remove flexibility. They create a shared starting point so that when flexibility is needed, everyone understands what they are flexing from and why.
Communication norms
Communication is where most team friction originates. Not because people are bad communicators, but because they have different expectations about how, when, and where communication should happen. One person thinks Slack messages should be answered within minutes. Another checks Slack twice a day. One person writes detailed emails. Another prefers a quick call. Without explicit agreements, these differences create resentment, missed information, and duplicated effort.
Discuss communication norms openly with your team and document the agreements. This is a perfect topic for a team retrospective in Manager Toolkit: ask the team what is working well about how you communicate, what is causing friction, and what you should agree on going forward. The resulting actions become your communication charter, a living document that new joiners can reference and the team can revisit as circumstances change.
- Channel purposeDefine what each communication channel is for. Slack for quick questions and informal updates. Email for external communication and things that need a record. Video calls for complex discussions. When people know where to put things, information stops getting lost.
- Response expectationsAgree on expected response times. Slack messages within a few hours during working hours. Emails within 24 hours. Urgent issues via phone call. Removing ambiguity about response times reduces both anxiety and frustration.
- Meeting-free blocksProtect time for deep work. Many teams agree on specific hours or days where meetings are not scheduled, giving everyone predictable blocks of uninterrupted time. This is especially important for teams doing creative or technical work.
- Async by defaultAgree that most communication should be asynchronous unless urgency demands otherwise. This respects different working patterns, time zones, and the fact that not everything needs an immediate response.
Decision-making frameworks
Few things slow a team down more than unclear decision-making. When nobody knows who has the authority to make a call, decisions either stall in endless discussion or get made unilaterally and then relitigated. Both patterns waste time and erode trust. A clear decision-making framework does not centralise control. It distributes it deliberately so that the right people make the right decisions with the right level of input.
Work with your team to define how different types of decisions are made. Low-impact, easily reversible decisions should be made quickly by the person closest to the work. Higher-impact decisions may need broader input or explicit sign-off. The key is making this explicit rather than leaving it to guesswork. Document the framework and refer to it when new decisions arise, especially when there is disagreement about who should decide.
- Decision typesCategorise decisions by impact and reversibility. A small UI change can be decided by the developer. A major architectural shift needs broader discussion. Making these categories explicit prevents both bottlenecks and recklessness.
- Owner vs. consultedFor each decision, be clear about who owns it and who needs to be consulted. The owner makes the final call. Consulted people provide input but do not have a veto. This prevents the trap of consensus-seeking on every decision.
- Disagree and commitAgree as a team that once a decision is made, everyone commits to it even if they disagreed. Relitigating decisions after they are made is corrosive. If new information emerges, reopen the discussion explicitly rather than undermining the decision quietly.
- Document decisionsRecord significant decisions and the reasoning behind them using meeting notes in Manager Toolkit. This creates a searchable history that prevents repeated debates and helps new team members understand why things are the way they are.
- Review and adaptDecision-making norms should evolve as the team matures. A new team may need more manager involvement. An experienced, high-trust team can push more decisions to individuals. Revisit the framework quarterly.
Collaboration and feedback
How a team collaborates day to day determines its effectiveness far more than individual talent. Some teams default to working in isolation and only come together when something goes wrong. Others over-collaborate, involving everyone in everything and creating a culture where nothing moves without a meeting. Neither extreme is healthy. Effective collaboration means clear agreements about when to work together, when to work independently, and how to give each other feedback along the way.
Feedback norms are particularly important. Most teams say they value feedback but have no agreed way of giving or receiving it. This means feedback either does not happen, or it happens inconsistently and sometimes badly. As a team, agree on how you want to give feedback: directly and promptly, focused on behaviour rather than personality, in private for critical feedback and in public for praise. Manager Toolkit's retrospectives are a natural forum for practising team-level feedback in a structured, safe environment.
- Pairing and reviewAgree on when work should be reviewed by a peer before it ships. Code reviews, document reviews, and design critiques all benefit from a second perspective. Define what "reviewed" means so it is not just a rubber stamp.
- Feedback timingAgree that feedback should be given close to the event, not saved for quarterly reviews. A quick conversation the same day is more useful than a detailed critique three months later when nobody remembers the context.
- Constructive framingAdopt a shared framework for giving feedback. Something as simple as "What I observed, the impact it had, what I would suggest" gives people a structure that reduces defensiveness and increases clarity.
- Retrospective rhythmRun team retrospectives regularly, at least monthly. These create a dedicated space for collective reflection on what is working, what is not, and what to change. The actions that come out of retrospectives become your evolving ways of working.
Meeting cadence and rituals
Meetings are the skeleton of a team's working rhythm. Too few and people feel disconnected. Too many and nobody has time to do actual work. The right cadence depends on the team, the work, and the stage of the project, but whatever it is, it should be intentional. Every recurring meeting on the calendar should have a clear purpose, a defined format, and a reason for existing. If it does not, cancel it.
Document your team's meeting rhythm as part of your ways of working. Include what each meeting is for, who attends, how long it lasts, and what the expected outcomes are. This clarity helps new joiners understand the cadence immediately and gives the team a framework for evaluating whether each meeting is still earning its place on the calendar.
- Daily standupIf your team runs standups, keep them to 15 minutes maximum. Focus on blockers and coordination, not status updates that could be shared asynchronously. If standups regularly overrun, they are trying to do too much.
- Weekly team syncA 30 to 45-minute weekly sync covers priorities, progress, and any decisions that need group input. Use a consistent agenda so preparation is easy and the meeting stays focused.
- Individual catchupsWeekly or fortnightly 1-1s between each team member and the manager. These are the individual’s meeting, not the manager’s. Prioritise their agenda, their concerns, and their development.
- RetrospectivesMonthly or per-sprint retrospectives focused on how the team is working, not just what it is delivering. Use these to surface improvements to your ways of working and create actions for the changes you agree on.
Keeping ways of working alive
The worst outcome is a beautifully documented set of ways of working that nobody follows. This happens when norms are imposed rather than agreed, when they are written once and never revisited, or when the manager does not model them. Ways of working need to be co-created with the team, revisited regularly, and treated as living agreements rather than fixed policies.
Schedule a quarterly review of your ways of working. Use a retrospective format: what is working well, what is not, what should we change? This keeps the norms relevant as the team evolves, new people join, and the work changes. Store the current version somewhere accessible, whether that is a team wiki, a shared document, or captured in meeting notes in Manager Toolkit, so that everyone can reference it and new joiners can get up to speed quickly.
- Co-create, do not imposeWays of working that are dictated by the manager without team input will not stick. Involve the whole team in defining and refining norms. People follow agreements they helped create.
- Review quarterlyWhat worked three months ago may not work now. Team composition changes, project demands shift, and tools evolve. A regular review ensures your norms stay relevant and useful.
- Model the behaviourAs the manager, you set the standard. If the team agreed on no Slack after 6pm but you are messaging at midnight, the norm is dead. Your behaviour is the most powerful signal of what is really expected.
- Reference them openlyWhen a decision aligns with your ways of working, say so. When someone drifts from the agreed norms, address it gently and refer back to the agreement. This keeps the norms visible and reinforced in daily work.
Build your team norms together
Use retrospectives to define ways of working collaboratively, and track the actions that turn agreements into habits.