Rituals

Leaders spend hours developing strategies and so little time communicating what they put together to the teams, but how can teams deliver on a strategy they are not familiar with? This simple ritual is a great way to ensure everyone is aligned and working to the same goals. Book a meeting room, share the document in advance, present an overview of the strategy and importantly, make time for questions. You want to ensure people are aware of and how they are contributing to it.

On a Centaur Stage episode, Dr. Constance Noonan Hadley, a researcher and speaker on the future of work, psychological safety, loneliness, well-being, team dynamics, and inclusive cultures, shared that her favorite ritual is “Sharing Good News”. At the beginning of every standup, everyone shares good news, not necessarily related to work. This ritual celebrates success, giving everyone bragging rights and allowing team members to learn more about what’s happening in each other’s life outside of work. It's a great way to create stronger empathy and connection

Whenever there's a new project presented, you can have as a ritual as debriefing session where the "why" behind the project is explained. You outline the task list, share thoughts, and come up with an action plan where everyone knows exactly why they have the role they have, as well as the purpose of the project.

Ask students or colleagues to share 3-5 unusual facts or fun stories about the city or country they are from that are not commonly known. It is a good way to learn something new. You will improve your understanding of the place and cultural environment where your team members and students are from/live. You may also ask them to prepare and share a one-page slide or short presentation that will include a map of their favorite places in their place and relevant pictures.

Sitting at a desk all day can leave you feeling achey and sore. One easy way to promote more active team participation and comfort is to lead a short 1-2 minute group stretch. Add music to encourage movement, combat fatigue and promote healthy blood flow.

HubSpot hosts an annual #GrowDay for customer-facing employees. These teams spend a full day disconnected from their work and instead, invest their time in personal and professional development. HubSpot hosts sessions for employees to learn about and up-skill themselves in areas such as negotiation, consulting and inclusive leadership. This year, the remote off-site was orchestrated around 25+ time zones from around the world!

You can use this ritual to celebrate an important milestone for individuals or teams in terms who have really delivered for the company. By pinning a symbol of the company onto the individuals' clothes you welcome them into the circle of trusted employees. Be careful of this ritual becoming a way of excluding people if badly managed.

Lunch and learns are a great way to promote knowledge sharing and improve presentation skills. The idea is simple, a team member creates a presentation about any idea and presents it to teammates. Topics can be related to the nature of work, or of an entirely different subject.

Create a slack channel or e-mail thread for recommendations of books, movies, series, recipes and activities. It's an easy way for individuals to get to know each other a little better and learn about what they may have in common.

Take a break from work-related banter (unless of course, you work in publishing) and invite your colleagues to join a monthly book club.

Offsites align teams, spark innovation, and drive organizational growth. This ritual is great for extended leadership teams to step away from work, zoom out and take time to think, ideate, and plan for the upcoming quarter. The best offsites are a mix of strategy, reflection, action, and engagement.

This ritual ensures you ceremoniously send off your departing colleagues. During a team time, host a graduation ceremony animated around a virtual white board where colleagues can share memories, parting thoughts and advice to each other. First, you will need to create a virtual whiteboard (we use Miro) with 2 fields; one to be filled by the team and the other by the departing team member. In the first field, colleagues share the person’s greatest contributions, things they love about them, and their superpowers. In turn, the team member leaving will fill in their field with the most important lessons they learned, their favorite moments as well as advice to the team. It’s a great way to show appreciation for their contributions, create a space to document aspects of your culture, and send your colleague off on their next adventure

Stand ups are short, focused, sharp daily meetings that usually last about 15 minutes where all team members answer some variation of the below 3 questions:
- What did you accomplish yesterday (victories)?
- What do you plan on accomplishing today (goals)?
- What is getting in your way (impediments)?

They are meant to help team members stay focused on their goals, understand each other's constraints, manage risks, and share knowledge or best practices.

Highlight good work or valiant efforts of your team members on a praise wall. This can be a slack channel or a weekly email thread commending employees on their achievements. A Praise wall will uplift morale, encourage performance and support a positive, nurturing work culture.

Begin each class or meeting with a short exercise to encourage mindful participation. This can be a short meditation, a moment to enjoy music with eyes closed or a quick intention-setting exercise. These rituals will result in a more concentrated, intentional approach to work and learning.

A great way to make sure we learn from both the great and not so great aspects of our teamwork is to have a bi-weekly retrospective where the team can share the best and worst parts of working together. A good framework for this conversation is to list the things that as a team we should stop doing, start doing, or continue doing with clear action points for the next cycle. Check out our insights for more on retrospectives.

Set up a way to collect innovative revenue or cost management ideas from all employees, create a committee to select some of these ideas for implementation, and provide a small budget for each idea. You never know which one ends up being what helps you grow or save the business.

Appoint a team member in charge of sharing the successes of a team in a single Slack post or e-mail thread. Keep it short and sweet and be sure to shout out any special all-star performers.

If an argument between team members breaks out and is resolved, those involved write their feelings and sentiments on a paper. The wider teams comes together to watch them tear up the paper and discard of the argument, putting it in the past and focusing on a way forward.

Sonal Bahl, an experienced HR Director and a Career Strategist, shared her favorite ritual on a recent episode of Centaur Stage. Sonal keeps a perfume bottle on her desk and when preparing for important meetings or planning to host a live webinar, she sprays a few spritzes. The smell uplifts her mood and consequently, helps her show up happier and motivated.

If your team has not been performing as well as it should be, because of problems having to do with trust, it might be the time for a call to clear the air. It can be difficult to approach trust-related topics, so we suggest that you start the call with some ice-breaking to ease up tensions. Then, you can set the issues at hand, and have the team recognize what is the root problem. Each member should openly talk about how they feel about it, without any interruption. After that is done, the team leader suggests a path forward to unanimous agreement, and offers everyone a last change to disclose their feelings. This ritual is helpful with settling passive conflicts, as it allows team members to own up to their mistakes, have/give transparent feedback, experiencing relief instead of bottling up emotions, and improving empathy to one another.

If we're being completely honest, Karaoke is best enjoyed in-person, but there can be something very creative about virtual karaoke. Assign a song to every participant or let them choose their own. Everyone should record an individual karaoke session singing the best they can. Let them get creative with backgrounds, costumes and props. Each team member should send the clip to the karaoke organizer, who will run a virtual award ceremony showing the best songs and awarding prizes. This is particularly relevant to theater students who are learning remotely. Source: Hygger Blog

Remote group work sessions can be extremely productive, but also a little tiring. Recently, our team had one of those and we broke out into a dance party to lighten the mood and take a step away from the slides. A few pets got involved and the endorphins that good music brought were a huge help in getting us re-energized for the hours of work ahead!

Begin each online meeting with a single question for employees/student, activating their critical thinking skills. This question should be relevant to the topic of the class/meeting, adding to the conversation and not distracting from the objective or purpose. Everyone can either share their response to a single question, or leaders/instructors can share a number asking the group to guess what that represents or stands for. It's a great way to get a group engaged before diving into the content of a meeting.

Prompt employees to nominate a peer that they feel embodies the values of the organization by creating an online submission form or adding a functionality to your HR software.

Remember to celebrate when something positive happens. A project being delivered, a new client, a milestone reached can all be good occasions to celebrate. You can do that by literally ringing a bell or you can design a proprietary emoticon that you use in your slack channel to make a happy announcement!

On the first day of each week, schedule repeat meetings for the team to all speak over Zoom and go over the priorities for the week. Note down every intention your teammates set for the week ahead. This meeting may take longer than usual but it will be worth it!

If you want your team to innovate, it's important to show them that failure is part of the process. A weekly session where people can share their failure of that week and help the team learn from it is one way of doing that.