A director or investor or business owner frequently gets the annoying question of how to build up a healthy business culture and strong teamwork.
Personally speaking, a team charter will benefit any business unit that experiences ups and downs and needs improvement. In particular, it is also best suited when a new team is formed. During that building, the team will build a shared understanding of how their teammates will best work together and outline the essential elements of your team’s communication, along with a set of concepts and skills that will focus and guide them.
What is team charter?
According to Mural.com, A team charter is a document that defines your goals, assets, and obstacles. Essentially, it’s like a product roadmap, except it’s for a single team. It focuses on their deliverables and how to best map them out over time.
I agree that many concepts qualify a “positive team attributes” and your team can tailor the right one that meets every team member’s mind. A team can handpick the scenarios that best match their business and corporate culture. There are lots of templates available online for use. No matter which templates you use, six points probably should be answered:
1. The context of Team in which a team has to answer:
What are their team’s core values?
What are the problems that that team encounters?
2. Mission & Objectives
What does the team have to achieve? Who does the team want to be in the short term? Long-term? In their company, or the position of the company in the sector?
The more specific goals your team can describe, the easier the operation plan can become. The team can base on the SMART model to define the goal.
3. Composition & Roles of the Team
Who is on the team? Their strengths and weaknesses?
To achieve the objectives, their members have to possess which skills and experience?
How will each teammate adjust their skills with the current situation and tasks?
Does the team have enough people to do the job?
How will the team liaise to attain the goals?
4. Resources and support available to the team
This question lists the resources available to the team to accomplish its goals. This includes budgets, time, equipment, and people.
What budget is available, in terms of time and money?
Can the team recruit new team members?
Concerning the performance assessments, changes to the resources required should be monitored regularly.
5. Team operation
The basic process has to be outlined with rules. Besides, the team needs to consider some specific scenarios that they frequently face and how they will respond appropriately and in time. Such as:
How much time should team members allocate to the team mission, and what priority do team activities have relative to other ongoing activities?
How should team members resolve any conflicts between their day jobs and the team mission?
What can the team do, what can it not do, and what does it need prior approval to do?
How does the team sort out their conflicts?
6. Standards of quality
This question will focus on each team member’s expectation of teamwork and its performance.
The next step is to take action.
Team charter serves as the base for how your team works together as a cohesive group. Therefore, the charter will create the roadmap at the beginning of the journey to evolve and develop continuously. Documents will be reviewed and improved, not written in stone.
Once the team’s agreement is signed, approved by each team member, it should be visible and accessible to everyone on the team.
In a word, building a team charter is a time-consuming task as the whole team needs to meet the consensus and keep following regularly which takes more time. Nevertheless, during the setup and practice, the teammate will enhance teamwork bonding and learn how to match with each other better. That is the outcome and essential drive of charter actually, right?
Source: Mintool & Mural