The contract that nobody signed

Every team already has a culture contract, that is, an ‘agreed’ way of working. The trouble is, nobody actually agreed to it.

We like to believe that culture ‘how we do things round here’ is well understood.  Unfortunately it isn't. In fact, it's mostly assumed.

For example, one person thinks a reply to an email within the hour is basic courtesy; another thinks anything before Thursday is keen, whilst some people just don’t bother at all. 

Similarly, someone treats a meeting as a decision to engage, whilst someone else treats it as a suggestion they're free to ignore. Nobody is wrong, exactly. They just tend to be working to different rules that were never written down.

The social contract (or culture deck as I call it) has always been the cornerstone of great teams, which is why I’ve always included it in my culture change programs. It removes the undocumented rules and personal assumptions and replaces them with a written agreement.

A 2025 study compared two global teams - one with a written social contract and one without. It’s no surprise that they found the one with the written version had clearer norms and fewer communication breakdowns that led to better outcomes. The team with the unwritten version relied on people honouring an agreement they were never party to and consequently faced problems that the other team didn’t.

Teams that take (just) an hour to build a charter - a plain document setting out how they'll communicate, collaborate, decide, disagree feedback and support one another - report better communication, more mutual support and higher satisfaction than teams who simply hope it all works out. The act of writing it down isn’t labour intensive or a new level of bureaucracy. It's the moment that we take something that is vague and make it specific.

You don’t make it abstract or unactionable. You write it in language a normal human in your organisation would use. Then (the part that people often skip) everyone agrees to it and you write it down.

This shifts accountability away from the loudest person (or the manager) and shares it across the room. An unwritten rule can only be enforced by someone with the standing to enforce it, which usually means the boss, which usually means it's applied unevenly and resented when it is. A written ‘rule’ created by the team can be pointed to by anyone. The new starter can hold the veteran to it. The quiet one can hold the loud one to it and so on.

It will need revisiting. Teams change, work changes, and a charter left in a drawer will very quickly become out of date. Look at it every quarter. Refresh it every year.

But write it down first. Memory is a wonderful thing, right up until the moment everyone remembers something different.