Team Charter

A team charter is a document that defines your team’s overall objectives,

resources, and constraints. 

Step-by-step guide to using a team charter template

Team Members

The most important step is to gather all team members. Regardless of location,
by using an online collaborative space such as Conceptboard, all team members
can be made to feel equal and valued, which is vitally important in this first
team building step. In the first column, team members use sticky notes to write
their name, and then list one strength and one weakness each to help better
understand each other.

Core Values

The second column is for Core Values. Team members share the individual
things they care about in the work environment. Then collectively, teams need
to agree on four or five top values- these are the things that will help guide
teamwork- and move them to the Consolidate section at the bottom. Core values
might be honesty, open lines of communication, freedom of expression or
independent thinking.

Group Norms

These are the practical ways the team will work together. While some team
members may appreciate daily standups, regular phone calls and texts, others
may enjoy working quietly from home. So to ensure communication runs
smoothly, it’s important to agree upon the group norms so there is no
miscommunication down the track.
Metrics of success

What does success look like to your team? In this section, it’s important to look
at the different markers of success, apart from just the bottom line. This might
be time, quality, growth or team work related, just to name a few. OKRs or
Objectives and key results is a goal management framework made famous by
Google. It focuses on driving team alignment and focusing on tangible metrics
and associated results.

Roles

What roles are necessary in the team, and who will play them? These might
include less obvious roles such as mediator, treasurer and social organiser, as
well as clearly defining the major roles directly related to the project.
Importantly- elect someone to be the enforcer of the Team Charter to ensure the
expectations are abided by.

Standards of quality

What is the standard of work that your team will consider acceptable? This is
important to define early on, and it will help you maintain high standards.
Features such as timeliness, originality, well researched, digitally advanced and
neat might be some of the key criteria your team will strive for.

Once you have at least four agreed-upon ideas in each of the Consolidate
sections, the hard work is done! The final step is to take those ideas and turn
them into complete sentences in one comprehensive document. This can then be
exported and shared with the team so that it’s always visible as a reference point
in case of disputes or conflict. If you want to take it one step further, ask all
team members to sign the charter (digitally or physically) for an extra level of
agreement. It’s a good idea to return to this team charter yearly to update it as
the team grows and evolves.