How social contracts made our product team more human
I joined Whispir about 10 months ago and I noticed that when discussions got animated, people would interrupt each other in meetings. As you may know, Zoom melts down whenever two or more people speak at once. This isn’t a big problem in person or when you use something like Discord, but alas, having multiple people talking at the same time is terrible for our brains.
I was interested in why this was happening and wanted to solve this. I thought about introducing a social contract to the team — how we were going to interact and work with each other, what’s acceptable and what isn’t — but I held off, seeing as I’d been in the team for all of 2 seconds.
I left it alone but then another meeting took place where some of my teammates were spoken over, and I found out that it was quite a regular occurrence (not just during heated debates ) — just because people are so passionate, so we made a “pact” to try and bring attention back to the person who was interrupted when this happens.
I decided to just come up with a “Product Team Social Contract” and shared it around with the team and newcomers. It was to form the basis of cultural norms we expected of one another and something we could talk with new hires about as they joined.
I’d seen social contracts work well at a previous job where an external consultant came into a project I was working on and suggested we use one as a way of building better cohesion within a newly formed team. One of the things that stuck with me was being conscious about not setting up meetings over lunch time.
At the time, I worked with a remote team in Chengdu, China, so we had some engineers in Melbourne and China which meant timezones were tricky to manage. This meant that we couldn’t have meetings over 12–2 Melbourne time (because it was lunch in Melbourne and people had lunch between 12–1pm or 1–2pm) and 2–4 Melbourne time (lunch time over in Chengdu). This just meant scrum rituals couldn’t take place during that time. In all honesty, the engineers also didn’t like starting work before 10am, so we really only had cross functional team meetings after 2pm Melbourne time. You can still have meetings with your colleagues / stakeholders / customers in Melbourne during Chengdu non meeting times. Admittedly, it became tricky when you added Brisbane engineers and daylight savings to the mix but it was still manageable.
Our current social contract at Whispir makes it clear what we expect from one another around meetings — we all know meetings are expensive and most of the time, can be done asynchronously. So we made a point about minimising the amount of meetings we have as a team and I’m consciously trying to push back on meetings set up by stakeholders and questioning in a gentle way “could this be an email/Slack thread instead”.
If you’re interested, below is the living document that is the Whispir Product Team Social Contract — it’s living in the sense that anyone in the team can add/modify/edit specific parts. At the end of the day, we all have to agree that this is how we are going to operate/work with each other.
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1. Inclusivity
We create an inclusive and respectful environment for everyone that we work with. This includes doing things like:
- Creating space for others — support less heard voices and differing opinions
- Being wary of when our colleagues are interrupted and bringing attention back to them. Try and do it ourselves if we feel comfortable
- Being able to disagree respectfully and coming at topics from a curious perspective and trying to understand the other party.
- Spell out acronyms the first time we use them in any given session/piece of communication and try and avoid using jargon if we can.
2. Meetings
- Meetings are blockers — respect people’s time
- Be wary of setting up too many meetings
- Avoid booking meetings over lunch or after hours
- Keep meetings short — 15–30 mins ideally
- Send out an agenda ahead of time where possible
- Solicit opinions from the whole group, especially quieter and less heard members
3. Encourage feedback
Giving feedback one on one after an event — positive and constructive. eg.
Hey I really liked how you handled that meeting or hey just curious as to why this was done, I would’ve done it this way.
4. Embrace newcomers
Go out of our way to make new members feel welcome — can be as simple as dropping a Slack message to see how they are going every week once they start and see if they need anything
5. Reliability
Being reliable and consistent is key to developing trust with your team and contributes greatly to high performing teams. If you say you will be somewhere, please arrive on time and be ready to go or if you are going to be late — let people know ahead of time. It’s important to show up for your peers when it counts.
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Feel free to copy/paste (this is what some other departments have done) or come up with your own or use it as a foundation for an improved version. I’d love to hear what’s in your social contract.
