You will produce a one-page communication charter and test it with your team.
Every team has communication rules. In most of them, nobody has written them down. New joiners pick them up by making mistakes: a message in the wrong channel, a late reply that annoyed the boss, a disagreement raised in the wrong way. A team communication charter puts those rules on one page, so everyone works from the same assumptions and new people don't have to guess.
This exercise takes about 30 minutes to draft, plus a few days for your teammates to comment. You'll build on the five norms you drafted after lesson 8.4, Set team norms for remote and hybrid work, and the preferences you collected after lesson 8.3, Generations at work without the stereotypes.
Collect three things before you start writing: your five draft norms on channels, reply times, working hours, decisions and meetings; the notes on how colleagues prefer to be contacted; and anything your company already has in writing, such as a remote work policy or an IT policy on which apps are allowed. Company policy sets the outer limits. Your charter only covers how this team works within them.
Look for patterns in what colleagues told you. If most people said they prefer a message before a call, that belongs in the charter. If one person's preference is unusual, it's better handled one-to-one than written into a team rule.
Channels and reply times cover the mechanics. A charter that stops there misses the two things teams find hardest to talk about: how feedback is given and how people disagree.
Write one or two lines on each. Draw on modules 7 and 8. For feedback, you might use situation, behaviour, impact from lesson 7.1, Describe the behaviour, not the person, and the rule about criticising privately. For disagreement, you might include asking for risks directly, from lesson 8.2, Hierarchy, face and hearing an indirect no, and the option of raising a concern privately before a meeting.
These lines are worth having precisely because they're awkward to say out loud. Once they're written down and agreed, a junior colleague who raises a risk is following the charter rather than challenging the boss.
A charter longer than a page doesn't get read. Use plain language and short lines. Cut anything that's obvious, anything that's company policy, and anything nobody would disagree with, such as "be respectful". Each line should change what someone actually does.
Here's a worked example. Wen Hui, a senior associate in a six-person compliance team at an insurance company, split between Singapore and Manila, wrote this:
Channels: Teams chat for quick questions. Email for decisions, regulators and anyone outside the team. Call for anything sensitive, or after three chat replies without progress. Reply times: chat within four working hours, email within one working day. Urgent means a phone call. Working hours: 9am to 6pm Singapore and Manila time, which are the same. Messages after hours are fine; replies wait until the next working day. Decisions: anything decided goes into the decision log on the team SharePoint within one day, by whoever made it. Meetings: weekly update in writing every Friday. Monday call for 30 minutes, decisions only. Agenda the day before. Feedback: privately, soon after the event, using situation, behaviour, impact. Praise can be public if the person is comfortable. Disagreement: raise concerns in the meeting or privately with the chair beforehand. Every proposal gets a "what could go wrong?" round before it's decided. Review: we revisit this charter every six months or when someone new joins.
That's under 200 words. It fits on one screen, and every line tells someone what to do.
Send the charter to your team clearly marked as a draft. A charter you announce as finished feels like a rule imposed from above, even if you're not the manager. A draft invites people to shape it, and people follow rules they helped write far more readily than rules handed to them.
Ask for two specific changes, not general comments. "What two things would you change or add?" gets more useful answers than "any thoughts?", for the same reason that asking for risks works better than asking for concerns. If you're not the team lead, get your manager's agreement before sharing, and consider asking them to send it.
Wen Hui got back a change to reply times, since her Manila colleagues handled a partner's queries in the afternoon and needed longer, and a request to add a line on leave cover.
A finished charter is one page, in plain language, with a line each on channels, reply times, working hours, decisions, meetings, feedback and disagreement, plus when it will be reviewed. It has been read by at least two teammates, and it reflects at least one change they suggested. Keep the draft beside the revised version. The revised one goes into your communication kit for the final project, and the differences between the two show how much of the charter now belongs to the team.
Write the one-page charter, share it with at least two teammates for comment, and revise it based on their answers.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).