You should document your team’s unwritten rules

I link out to Harvard Business Review a lot, but overall it’s kind of a slopfest of a website that says a lot of obvious shit about business and talks about tech companies too much. However, they had a good one the other day called “Write down your team’s unwritten rules.” I am a little bit surprised that we got to 2020 and no one knows this and this article even needs to be written, but it’s also kind of understandable.

Here’s the problem with an “unwritten rules” document, just in general (er, problems):

• Oftentimes, “unwritten rules” are things that middle managers do not like to communicate, because then when someone violates such a rule, they can use it as a way to punish or scare them, which is the only way a lot of people know to manage. A good COVID example is “If I have been on lots of video calls today, can I turn off video on a later call?” The unwritten rule might be “You should never turn off video,” but then once Rachel turns it off, Rachel can get punished by Dan, her clueless nitwit manager. That makes Dan feel good, so he doesn’t want the unwritten rules communicated, because that removes a channel of power from him.
• Because “unwritten rules” are somewhat casual or informal, there is no logical place to store them within an organization. You could put them on the Intranet, but let’s be honest, you can hide a dead body on the Intranet at most companies and no one would find it. People don’t access that thing. If you put it on a formal channel or Knowledge Hub, some high-middle manager will bitch that it’s “too casual” or “informal” and shouldn’t reside with official documents.
• Most silos and managers and teams have their own versions of unwritten rules, and so there’s no real standardization of them across an org.
• The very term “unwritten rules” implies that, well, you don’t write them down.

So those are the reasons this doesn’t actually happen, sadly. But it makes a lot of sense to do it, because oftentimes the supposed “culture” of a job is really just a series of written (HR? Legal? Bosses?) and unwritten rules, and you need to scramble to figure out the intersection you need to arrive at to avoid the axe falling on you during the next revenue blip.

It would be nice if people could standardize the unwritten rules of their team, thusly. And while we’re at it, maybe we could make the employee handbook relevant again?