Availability
- Our core collaboration hours are 10:00–15:00 in the team's main time zone.
- Calendars stay up to date — if it is not on the calendar, assume we are available.
- No one is expected to reply outside their local working hours.
Copy a ready-to-use working agreement for your Scrum, remote or hybrid team. Start with the template below, see a completed example, or build and vote on your agreement together — free, with no signup.
Team: ___ Purpose: ___ Created: ___ Review date: ___ Availability and focus — Our core collaboration hours are ___. When unavailable during those hours, we ___. We protect focus time by ___. Communication — Use ___ for urgent questions. Use ___ for non-urgent discussion. During working hours we aim to respond within ___. Meetings — We only schedule meetings when ___. An invitation must include ___. Anyone may decline when ___. Decisions — We make routine decisions by ___. Important decisions are recorded in ___. If we cannot agree, ___ makes the call after ___. Delivery and blockers — We raise blocked work after ___. Pull requests should be reviewed within ___. Work in progress is limited by ___. Feedback and disagreement — We give feedback by ___. When we disagree, we ___. Sensitive issues are handled ___. Keeping this agreement alive — We review these agreements every ___. Anyone may propose a change by ___.
Core overlap is 10:00–15:00 Eastern. No expectation of replies outside a person's local working hours. Slack questions receive an acknowledgment within four working hours; urgent production issues use the pager/phone. No-agenda meeting invitations may be declined. Architecture decisions are summarized in the engineering decision log within one business day. Pull requests receive a first review within one working day. A blocker older than four working hours is raised in the delivery channel. We criticize the idea, not the person. The team reviews this agreement at the first retrospective of every quarter and whenever a new member joins.
Distributed across time zones? See the remote team working agreement sample.
Team norms are informal habits a team falls into. A working agreement makes them explicit: a short, team-owned set of operating rules that everyone agrees to and reviews regularly. A team charter is broader — mission, roles, goals and scope — and often contains the working agreement as one section.
Then set a review date.
| Vague | Specific |
|---|---|
| Communicate well | Acknowledge direct work questions within four working hours. |
| Respect focus time | No internal meetings before 10 a.m.; Wednesday afternoons are meeting-free. |
| Review PRs quickly | First PR review within one working day. |
Propose observable behaviors, vote on what matters, and edit your shared agreement as your team learns. Create a room and share its link so everyone can contribute.
Capture concrete ways of working together.
See which proposals have the strongest support.
Revisit the wording with author and Scrum Master controls.