Go Beyond Organizational Values with Community Agreements

Get Tried-and-tested Example Community Agreements to Help Get You Started

Organizational values are part of defining how we do what we do, but they’re often not enough. When organizational values fall short, frustration and distrust fill in the gap leading to an unhealthy organizational culture marked with disconnection and disengagement, lost productivity, stagnated innovation and creativity, problems with employee attraction and retention, anxiety, increased red tape, siloization, and more.

In our work, we’ve found that teams and organizations build much stronger and resilient cultural foundations when they go beyond values by making and being accountable to co-created community agreements (more on this here). 

Community agreements are a concise set of shared and clear commitments about how we are going to show up as leaders and teammates. They’re a tool to activate community identity by thoughtfully shaping group dynamics, patterns of interaction, and collective conversation. They can be co-created for a gathering, project, team, or organization-wide. They involve setting clear expectations, making promises and keeping them—a practical approach that helps build trust at scale.

To help get you started with co-creating your own community agreements with your team or organization, we’ve curated some of our go-to agreements that we often introduce as a starting point with clients. We’ve assembled these example community agreements in a Google Doc so you can easily make a copy for yourself and collaborate with your team to make them your own.