What can you take away from the experience?
Remote Work Can Lack Structure
Remote work has flexibility and the opportunity to rethink how we live our daily lives. Remote work has well-being and planet sustainability benefits. But the absence of externally-imposed structures can be disorienting – because we don’t have the structures we had before. Your team may be reporting that days ‘disappear’ and can be missing meaning, connection, and rhythm.
Flexible Worlds Need New Structures
In an increasingly flexible world, you need to create new structures that give shape to our daily lives and help people get into the same page. Rituals help create that structure by creating form and meaning.
Rituals Are An Answer
Rituals are actions that a person or group does repeatedly following a pattern or script in which they’ve imbued symbolism and meaning. Rituals create meaningful moments for occasions with intentions and by actions. is not new. It has been done in formats like television news for decades. You learned techniques used in television so that you could see ‘how’ others address this in their work.
You may want to lead-off a future meeting with an ‘exercise’ or ‘game’ to extend the learnings from your experience. Here is an exercise Glenn developed for your team:
In the Teamraderie experience, we discussed rituals having three components – occasion, intention, and action.
An occasion is a particular time marked by certain circumstances. A birthday, the start of a meeting, the end of a workday.
An intention is how you want people to feel when engaging in a ritual – such as calm, excitement, curiosity, or focus.
An action is what happens during a ritual – such as closing eyes, clapping, wearing hats.
Rituals go beyond practical purpose (they have a meaning beyond the explicit); handshakes used to be a way to show you do not have a weapon, but now they are about showing connection.
Here’s an exercise for your team:
Option 1
Ask your team to each share a “ritual” that they’ve observed in their daily lives. Ask them to share what the ritual is – and what the ritual is beyond the practical purpose (e.g., morning shower is not just about hygiene).
Option 2
Let’s revise (or create a new team ritual). Step 1, let’s think about on ‘occasion’ or a ‘transition’ – such as the beginning of a workday/work week, or the introduction of a new person to the team. Think about a milestone that we hit; rituals can help milestones be recognized. Step 2, let’s think about ‘intention’ – which can be showing gratitude for good work or to acknowledge peoples’ presence. Finally, think about the ‘action’ you want to use. Movements, gestures, sounds, claps, poses, props or other things can be simple ways to arrive at an action. Be willing to experiment (do iterations on the ritual) to ensure your ritual addresses the objective of getting people to feel the way you want them to feel.
Teamraderie has been asked by some managers for a ‘post-experience summary email’ that they can share with the team members after the 45-minute Teamraderie experience. We drafted a memo for you to customize:
Team,
Thank you for joining our Design a Team Ritual team experience.
The purpose of the time together was two-fold.
First, for the past 2+ years, we have embraced remote work. While we’ve gained productivity and sustainability, it has come at the cost of some disorientation and lack of structure. The ‘rituals’ experience was designed to help us be thoughtful about that and to collectively help each other – through designing a team ritual – to bring new structure to our work.
Second, we have an opportunity to ‘improve’ how we work – both our team and for the people who might report to you or be part of your project teams. This exercise was about becoming intentional on ‘how’ we want people to feel and creating a ritual to accomplish that. It’s always a good idea to be more intentional about creating the workplace we want to see.
I look forward to sharing more moments like these with each other – on these topics and others – as we go about trying to do our best work.
Sincerely,
Manager
Teamraderie experiences are designed in collaboration with management professors at Stanford University and Harvard Business School. Here are the principles incorporated into your experience:
Creation of ‘Safe Space’ for Meaningful Conversation
A University of Chicago (2021) study found employees experience deeper job satisfaction and rate their workplace higher when they are prompted to have more meaningful conversations with colleagues. This Teamraderie experience creates a ‘safe space’ for deeper conversation and a contextual way to prompt more meaningful interactions.
Team Development of Shared Empathy
A Harvard Medical School (2017) study showed ‘shared empathy’ – a leading indicator of effective teams – is constructively developed when members are exposed to deeper elements of each others’ lives, particularly factors of ‘motivation’ and ‘intention’. This Teamraderie experience cultivates ‘shared empathy’ by creating space for sharing of relatable elements from working together.
Team Discussion of How to ‘Action’ a Shared Value
A MIT-Sloan (2020) study found that teams who openly discuss ‘how’ members can take actions that align with a stated cultural value (e.g., “better meetings”) demonstrate 25% higher performance of that value, as measured by financial metrics. This Teamraderie experience creates space for an explicit discussion of “how” you can improve remote work through rituals.
Teamraderie recommends the documents and publications below for additional perspective:
Author: Francesca Gino, Harvard Business School
Highlight: “Rituals – even silly ones – a shared touch point that let all attendees, no matter where they join from, to feel a common purpose.”
Author: Jared Spataro, Microsoft
Highlight: “Those who embrace a new mindset and shift cultural norms will best position their people and their business for long-term success. Adapting to the influx of change in this business environment is no easy feat.”