Another quarter, another culture deck. A founder stands in front of the team, shares an emotional origin story, and unveils a grid of core values: “Ownership,” “Impact,” “Candor.” People nod. The deck gets posted to the team wiki. By the time the next sprint starts, it is a forgotten artifact. At its best, a culture deck tells a compelling story about who you want to be, but it rarely tells anyone what to do differently on a Tuesday afternoon. That is why the most effective teams are moving away from values walls and choosing to define a practical working agreement instead. A working agreement is a small set of behavioral commitments that translate your stated values from adjectives into actions. It does not tell you what to admire; it tells you what to do, especially when work gets messy.
Why Culture Decks Leave Too Much Unsaid
Culture decks are not malicious; they are just abstract. Take a value like “respect.” One teammate interprets respect as “never criticize anyone in a public channel.” Another teammate interprets it as “be honest enough to say the hard thing in the room.” The same value, printed on the same wall, can lead to opposite behaviors. One person thinks they are being respectful; another thinks they are being silenced.
The same problem appears with every aspirational noun. “Transparency” does not tell you when to share bad news. “Ownership” does not tell you how to handle a decision that falls between two job titles. “Boldness” does not tell you how to raise a concern about a risky feature. Culture decks present values as though they are self-explanatory, but the most important part of culture is the negotiation of those values in practice. Without a shared operating layer, the loudest person on the team tends to define what “boldness” means.
A Working Agreement Is the Missing Translation Layer
A working agreement is not another document about the future of the company. It is a small, concrete contract between the people who work together every day. It focuses on behavior that can be observed, repeated, and improved. Instead of asking “What kind of team do we want to be?” it asks “What should we do when a deadline slips, when a retrospective gets quiet, or when a technical disagreement turns heated?”
Consider a team that claims to value “blameless learning.” That value sounds fine, but it does not prevent a post-incident review from turning into a search for the responsible engineer. A working agreement fixes that gap. The team might agree that when an incident happens, every statement in the review will be phrased as a system observation rather than a personal judgment. That is not vague; it is checkable. Anyone can point to a sentence and ask whether it is about the system or the person.
This is why a working agreement beats a values wall. A values wall is a destination; a working agreement is a set of guardrails. It does not require employees to guess how a value applies to an unfamiliar situation. It gives them a pattern they can follow until the right behavior becomes automatic.
How to Build a Working Agreement That Works
Too many teams write working agreements as another wall decoration: a list of pleasant norms like “be kind” and “arrive on time.” That is just a silent culture deck. A real working agreement should be built from friction, not fantasy. The process is simple, but it requires honest input from the whole team.
1. Audit the past month for recurring friction
Start with a real problem. Look back at the last few weeks and name the moments that caused confusion, delay, or frustration. Common examples include meetings that run late, discoveries made after a decision was already announced, and quiet teammates whose concerns only come up in private chat. Write those moments down. They are the raw material for your working agreement.
2. Turn every complaint into a “We will not” or “We will” statement
Each point of friction points toward a behavioral rule. There is no need to make the rule broad enough to govern all of humanity; it only needs to govern the next iteration of your work. The more specific the rule, the more likely it is to be respected.
Examples of genuine working agreements:
- When a decision is made in a meeting, the facilitator posts the decision in the team channel before the meeting is marked complete.
- If a deliverable will slip more than a day, the owner announces it as soon as they know—not when they have a solution.
- During design feedback, “I don’t like this” must be followed by a concrete aspect of the work or an alternative direction.
- If a teammate raises a concern after a decision has been made, they open a separate thread instead of reopening the original conversation.
Notice that none of these require a company-wide values offsite. They solve problems that show up in the actual rhythm of teamwork.
3. Keep the list short enough to remember
A working agreement with fifteen rules will not survive. Teams are busy, and memory is selective. The goal is to identify the behaviors that matter most: perhaps one for decision-making, one for meetings, one for disagreement, and one for communication. That is usually enough. If a behavior does not need to be written down, leave it out.
4. Make it visible where the work happens
The difference between a working agreement and a culture deck often comes down to placement. A culture deck sits in a slide library; a working agreement should live in the project hub, the team channel header, or the weekly meeting notes. When you spend weeks revising a document, you refine your thinking. The real value is not the final paragraphs but the behavior change we practice while writing them.
Small Teams: The Place Where Working Agreements Shine
Many organizations are trying to improve culture top-down by asking a leadership team to produce an aspirational deck. But culture is not formed in large town halls; it is formed in the recurring spaces of small teams. A product squad has a different pace than a sales group and a different information density than an executive team. A single set of global values cannot govern all of those textures. A working agreement can be specific to the group that lives inside the work.
This is especially true for teams working in hybrid and asynchronous modes. When people do not share the same hallway, the same coffee machine, or the same office hours, they need more words to describe how they expect one another to behave. Without shared physical signal, a working agreement provides a clear reference point for a question like “When can I interrupt a teammate?” or “How quickly should I respond to a request?” These may look like minor logistics, but they define the texture of trust. They are the culture.
For a culture deck to remain useful to distributed teams, it often needs to be interpreted anew in every time zone. A working agreement is already contextual, so it travels better.
What To Do With Your Existing Culture Deck
The argument is not necessarily to rip down every values wall. A culture deck can be useful as a compass, especially for hiring, onboarding, and high-level storytelling. It just does not belong at the operating level of everyday collaboration. Values are not false; they are incomplete. They need teams to translate them into behavior.
If your team already has a culture deck, extract what is meaningful from it. For each core value, ask the question: “If this value were alive, what would I see people doing?” Then take the answers and turn them into a working agreement. If the value is “curiosity,” the working agreement might be that every proposal must include a note on what would challenge the proposal. If the value is “customer obsession,” the agreement might be that no feature is scoped without a quote from a customer interview.
A good internal process can transform the way your team thinks about culture. Rather than arguing about the meaning of a single adjective, your team will argue about whether a specific behavior was respectful, transparent, or collaborative. That is a much more productive conversation.
Revisit the Working Agreement Regularly
Any agreement, no matter how thoughtful, has a shelf life. Team composition changes, deadlines change, and the tools your team relies on change. A working agreement is a living document. It should be scheduled for review just like a project retrospective, not shown once at onboarding and never mentioned again.
At the start of a new project or after a new person joins, ask the team two questions: Where did our working agreement hold, and where did we feel the need for a new rule? The second question is a gift, because it reveals hidden friction before it hardens into resentment. It is also a way for new teammates to shape the culture without feeling as though they need to challenge an official deck.
The language of the working agreement should evolve too. One team might arrive at “When in doubt, write it out” as a way of saying that asynchronous communication is preferred. Another team might discover that their original rule about “no Slack messages after six p.m.” is no longer necessary. Culture is not a static target; it is a set of patterns that either get better or decay. The agreement is only useful when it reflects what the team is learning about itself.
A Values Wall Can Wait
If you are starting a new team or preparing a big group for a period of important change, resist the urge to create another culture deck first. Instead, begin with the working agreement. Answer the practical question: “How are we going to treat each other when we disagree, when we are overloaded, and when things go wrong?” That exercise is harder than choosing a synonym for “integrity,” but it is also more valuable. A working agreement gives your values a body. It makes culture visible in actions—in decisions made under pressure, in the way criticism is delivered, and in the quiet comfort of teammates who know what to expect from one another. The culture deck can wait. The agreement cannot.
Teams do not fail because they write weak values statements. They fail because the gap between their stated values and daily behavior grows too wide. The shortest bridge across that gap is not poetry in a slide deck; it’s a simple, contextual, and honest agreement about how the work will be run.
