Team Charter Template — Goals, Norms & Ways of Working
Define how your team operates — its purpose, goals, communication norms, and recognition habits — before misalignment becomes a problem. Preview the template below or use the interactive version in FigJam.
What is a team charter?
A team charter is a shared document that defines how a team operates — its purpose, goals, working norms, communication expectations, and the commitments members make to each other. It's not a project plan and it's not an org chart. It's the answer to "how does this team actually work?" — written down before everyone assumes the answer is the same thing.
The best team charters are short, honest, and co-created. A charter written by a manager and handed down carries less weight than one the team built together in a working session. The process of writing it is often as valuable as the document itself — it surfaces assumptions about roles, communication, and recognition that would otherwise remain invisible until they caused friction.
See the Template in Action
Explore the template below to see how it's structured. To use the fully editable version, open it in FigJam, where you can copy, customise, and collaborate with your team.
30 questions to ask in a team charter session
Use these to guide the session, surface assumptions, and get to agreements rather than aspirations.
About purpose and goals
About ways of working
About communication and feedback
About recognition and engagement
About trust and inclusion
About the charter itself
How a team charter supports employee engagement
A team charter improves employee engagement by making implicit expectations explicit — reducing the friction and anxiety that comes from uncertainty about how things work. When people know what's expected of them, how decisions get made, and how the team communicates, they spend less mental energy navigating ambiguity and more energy doing the actual work.
The recognition section of a team charter is where this matters most for engagement specifically. Teams that agree on a recognition norm in their charter — not just "we celebrate wins" but specifically how and where — are significantly more likely to follow through on it. The charter turns an intention into a commitment, and a commitment into a habit.
The data from teams using Karma bears this out. Recognition that happens inside the tools the team already uses — Slack, MS Teams — and is visible to the whole team, not just the manager and the recipient, has a measurably higher impact on engagement than private appreciation. The team charter is the right moment to establish this norm deliberately, rather than hoping it emerges organically.
Frequently asked questions
What is a team charter?
A team charter is a shared document that defines how a team operates — its purpose, goals, working norms, communication expectations, and the commitments members make to each other. It's not a project plan or an org chart. It's the answer to "how does this team actually work?" — written down before everyone assumes the answer is the same thing.
What should a team charter include?
A team charter should cover: team purpose and mission, goals and objectives, roles and responsibilities, ways of working (meeting cadence, decision-making, tools), communication norms (async vs sync, feedback style), recognition practices, and team agreements (what we commit to and what we won't do). It should be short enough to actually read and honest enough to actually use.
How do you write a team charter?
The most effective approach is a single 60–90 minute working session where the team fills in the charter together, section by section. The manager facilitates but doesn't dominate — the goal is for the team to own the output. Walk through each section in order, surface assumptions, test whether they're shared, and agree on specifics rather than leaving things vague. End the session by agreeing on a review date.
What's the difference between a team charter and a project charter?
A team charter defines how a standing team operates day-to-day — its purpose, norms, and ways of working regardless of which project it's working on. A project charter defines the scope, goals, timeline, and stakeholders for a specific project. Team charters last as long as the team exists and are revisited periodically; project charters are created per project and archived when it ends.
How often should you update a team charter?
Quarterly is the most common cadence for reviewing a team charter — frequent enough to catch things that have shifted, infrequent enough that it doesn't feel like busywork. The charter should also be revisited whenever significant changes happen: a new team member joins, the team's mandate changes, or a recurring friction point signals that a norm isn't working.
How does a team charter support employee engagement?
A team charter improves employee engagement by making implicit expectations explicit — reducing the friction and anxiety that comes from uncertainty about how things work. When teams agree on recognition norms in their charter specifically, they create a foundation for consistent appreciation that directly drives engagement. Teams with clear charters report higher psychological safety, clearer priorities, and better collaboration.
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