Using Rituals to Strengthen Your Team

Reciting or reading learned words, performing symbolic actions, or participating in a ceremony — we’ve all experienced these sorts of rituals. Every culture in the world builds community through rituals. In fact, rituals are arguably a universal part of human social existence. Just as we cannot imagine a society without language, we would be equally hard-pressed to imagine a society without rituals.

A group’s rituals are, in part, what makes it different from every other group. For example, Americans recite the Pledge of Allegiance, sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” and say “I do” when they marry; Boy and Girl Scouts make their promise and make the scouting sign; and religious groups follow dietary laws, chant, light candles, kneel, stand up, sing songs, eat symbolic foods, fast, and make sacrifices, all following carefully specified rules.

Individuals sometimes develop idiosyncratic personal rituals to help them prepare for or overcome great challenges. According to Francesca Gino and Michael Norton:(1)

Basketball superstar Michael Jordan wore his North Carolina shorts underneath his Chicago Bulls shorts in every game; Curtis Martin of the New York Jets reads Psalm 91 before every game. And Wade Boggs, former third baseman for the Boston Red Sox, woke up at the same time each day, ate chicken before each game, took exactly 117 ground balls in practice, took batting practice at 5:17, and ran sprints at 7:17. Boggs also wrote the Hebrew word chai [“life”] in the dirt before each at bat, even though Boggs was not Jewish.

Do rituals like these actually improve performance? As it turns out, the superstitious rituals Gino and Norton describe enhanced the athletes’ confidence in their abilities, motivated greater effort, and, indeed, improved subsequent performance. These findings are consistent with research in sports psychology demonstrating the benefits of pre-performance routines, from improving attention and execution to increasing emotional stability and confidence.

The healthcare team, like every other group, can create and teach its members unique rituals. These workplace rituals need not be costly, time-consuming, or difficult to execute. Yet, they can be worthwhile. According to Lee Colan,(2) rituals are the “fabric of our culture,” and they are critical for defining connections within a team. He suggests, “Once we establish deeply engrained team rituals, we view them as the way we do things around here.”

WHAT IS A RITUAL?

Serge Kahili King(3) defines a ritual as a well-defined sequence of words and/or actions designed to focus attention, establish significance, and achieve beneficial results. The word ritual commonly brings to mind exotic images of primitive others engaged in mystical activities. However, Kevin Carrico(4) says, we can find rituals, both sacred and secular, throughout modern society. For example, we continue to use rituals to mark the beginning of significant events (e.g., baby showers, grand openings, ship launchings, coronations, taking the oath of office); the end of life or periods of life (e.g., funerals, bachelor parties, happy hours); the completion of important tasks or performances (e.g., graduation ceremonies, curtain calls, awards ceremonies); the transition of one state or time period to another (e.g., birthday parties, anniversary celebrations, baptisms, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, confirmations) and commitments (e.g., marriage ceremonies, ordinations).

There is a marked difference between a ritual and a custom or tradition. According to Linda Neale,(5) a custom is any frequent or common repetition of a social convention. For example, you may have a custom of singing a certain song in the shower. Customs become traditions when they are passed on to others, particularly to succeeding generations. Your custom of singing your song in the shower won’t become a tradition unless you teach it to your children and they sing it in their showers, too.

Rituals go a bit deeper. The word ritual is related to rites, which are formal acts of observance or procedures in accordance with prescribed rules.

Rituals, Neale says, are performed in the same way, at the same time, and without fail, and they are taught to and performed by others. As well, rituals often have symbolic components and they are always meaningful. So, singing your song in the shower may not have much meaning; however, the ritual of singing our national anthem at public gatherings most definitely does have meaning.

SIX BENEFITS OF CREATING AND USING TEAM RITUALS

Healthcare leaders are in the ideal position to use rituals to build and strengthen their teams. Here are six benefits of using rituals in your organization:

• Rituals can create and cement your team’s unique identity. Organization-specific rituals will be unique to your team and bring a cohesiveness to it. Rituals will help every employee feel connected to every other employee, present and past.

• Rituals can save your team time. By ritualizing certain actions, you can get started without having to invest much strategic planning into them. For example, if you ritualize the way you celebrate staff birthdays, everything you do to celebrate birthdays will become automatic. You will know which cake and beverages to serve, which plates and cups to use, which balloons to buy, how to set up the area for the celebration, who will say what, and who will lead the singing of “Happy Birthday.”

• Rituals can act as your team’s social glue. Rote repetition of team ritual tasks creates a feeling of togetherness. Often you see teams invent their own, sometimes secret rituals to bind the group more closely. Executing well-known procedures together synchronizes people and strengthens the common ground on which to build trust.

• Rituals can pace your team’s workday/work week/work year. Rituals create a rhythm that is unique to your organization. For example, your team will get used to having a morning huddle at the start of every day if you make it a ritual. They will know that staff meetings are always on the same day and at the same time. Adapting to changing schedules depletes energy; rituals become second nature to everyone and create an environment where work can flow without friction.

• Rituals require team discipline. It may be tempting to skip a ritual or to abbreviate it, especially when time is short. However, keeping faithful to a ritual will help your team learn not to cut corners, even when they may be tempted to do so.

• Rituals help us connect to specific mental states or emotions. For example, practicing a ritual that is designed to help your employees relax or have fun helps them connect their emotions to other times when the same ritual helped them relax or have fun.

THE HALLMARKS OF EFFECTIVE TEAM RITUALS

If you’d like to design a ritual for your team, make sure that whatever you come up with actually works. First, establish your goal. What would you like your ritual to do? Do you want to make everyone on your team feel that they belong? Clear the decks for a new project? Mourn a failure so you can move on? Mark an important milestone? The more specific your goal, the more likely it will be effective.

Beyond setting the goal, make sure your ritual has staying power. Researchers Christine Legare and Andre Souza(6) of the University of Austin, Texas, studied ritual efficacy and found that rituals were likely to be more effective if they had three elements:

• Several steps. Strive to create a ritual that has at least three distinct steps or parts. For example, light a candle, say certain words, and pass a certain object to each member of the group. Or hold hands, sing a song, and have everyone repeat after you.

• Procedures that are repeated. For example, you may repeat certain words two or three times during the ritual. Or you may have each member of your team take turns performing the same act.

• A specified time or occasion to which it is linked. For example, you may tie your ritual to an anniversary, a specified day in a specified month, the beginning of a season or quarter, the end or beginning of the year, or the day a new employee joins your team.

SIX KINDS OF ORGANIZATIONAL RITUALS

Hahn(7) identifies six kinds of rituals that are used in organizations:

• Rites of passage rituals mark a change in an employee’s status, such as the beginning of employment or a shift to another department.

• Rites of degradation sometimes accompany the removal of high-status individuals.

• Rites of enhancement heighten the status and social identities of individuals, such as a ritual that acknowledges a promotion.

• Rites of renewal strengthen existing social structures and thus improve their functioning, such as a ritual to mark performance evaluations.

• Rites of conflict reduction resolve conflicts, such as those connected to arbitration or mediation.

• Rites of integration increase the interaction of potentially divergent subdivisions. Participating in the ritual revives shared feelings of unification and commitment to a larger system.

20 OPPORTUNITIES FOR TEAM RITUALS

Linking your team rituals to specific occasions makes them more meaningful. Here are 20 opportunities for you to create and practice rituals with your employees:

• Start or end of the year.

• Start or end of the work week.

• Weekdays (Fun Dance Mondays, Tacky Tie Tuesdays, High Five Wednesdays, Thirsty Thursdays, and Fun Food Fridays.)

• Start or end of the workday.

• Start of each month, quarter, or season.

• End of the organization’s fiscal year.

• A new staff member’s first day.

• Start or end of every staff meeting.

• Employees’ birthdays or work anniversaries.

• The anniversary of the founding date of your healthcare organization.

• When you achieve milestones such as a specified production figure or a specified number or patients.

• Offbeat holidays such as International Talk Like a Pirate Day or National Pickle Day.

• When team members have performed exceptionally well.

• When you experience failures and setbacks.

• When an employee comes up with a cost- or time-saving idea that you implement.

• When an employee earns a new credential.

• When an employee retires.

SEVEN INTERESTING WORKPLACE RITUALS

Are you ready to create a new ritual for your healthcare employees? You may be able to draw inspiration from corporate rituals. Here are seven interesting ones:

• Cheer ritual. Yum! Brand is a huge restaurant corporation that includes Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, Long John Silver’s, A & W, and others. According to Lee Colan,(2) employees at Yum! Brand start each staff meeting with the Yum! cheer, and it’s an honor to be asked to lead it. Colan explains, “Everyone participates, every time, with everything they have! Trust me, I’ve been a guest during the meeting and done the cheer myself. Sound corny? Not at all. It’s an energizing and fun way to connect a team and start a meeting . . . a powerful ritual.”

• Gratitude ritual. Colan also reports that employees at the Maritz Performance Improvement Company conduct a ritual called the Thanks a Bunch award. It begins with one employee who brings in a bunch of flowers and a thank-you card to give to a hardworking employee. That employee keeps one flower and the card, but passes on the remaining bunch and their own thank you card to another employee who, in turn, repeats the process. At the end of the day, after all the flowers and cards have been distributed, the team members gather together to collect all the cards and draw for prizes.

• Event ritual. John Warrillow(8) reports that Gentle Giant, a moving company based in Somerville, Massachusetts, hosts an annual Stadium Run up and down the stairs at Harvard stadium. The ritual has become a rite of passage for new movers and is deeply engrained in the corporate culture, which celebrates hard work, he says.

• Innovation ritual. Warrillow also reports that at Australian-based Atlassian, engineers receive one day off each quarter to tinker with a pet project. The only stipulation is that the engineers must present the results of their day in the lab to the rest of the company the next morning.

• Joy ritual. According to Judi Neal,(9) Ben & Jerry’s has a ritual known as the joy squad. Each month a different group of employees is selected to be members of the joy squad. For that month, the full-time job of these employees is to bring joy to other employees. They dress in costume, do skits, pass out ice cream, bring in balloons, and do whatever else they can think of that will make Ben & Jerry’s a more joyful place to be.

• Failure ritual. Neal also reports that at Pfizer Research and Development Labs, a celebration is held every time a particular compound fails to meet scientific and financial standards. Employees gather together for a lunch or cake as a way of marking the end of the failed project they had been working on, and to acknowledge that it is better to let go of something that will not be successful.

• Halloween ritual. The Matrix Group(10) reports that it holds a Halloween pumpkin carving contest for its staff every year. Each Matrix team carves and submits an entry. Clients, friends, and fans are then asked to vote for their favorite carved pumpkins, which are awarded prizes.

Excerpted from Next-Level Healthcare Employees: Improving the Performance of a Good Team by Laura Hills, DA.

REFERENCES

1. Gino F, Norton MI. Why Rituals Work. Scientific American, May 14, 2013. www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-rituals-work/ .

2. Colan L. Rituals Are a Way to Reinforce the Fabric of High-performing Teams. The Business Journals. April 30, 2007. https://www.bizjournals.com/houston/stories/2007/04/30/smallb4.html .

3. King SK. Rituals and Modern Society. Huna International blog. www.huna.org/html/skritual.html . Accessed May 22, 2023.

4. Carrico K. Ritual. Cultural Anthropology blog. www.culanth.org/curated_collections/4-ritual . Accessed May 22, 2023.

5. Neale L. The Power of Ceremony. Rio Rancho, NM: Eagle Spirit Press; 2011.

6. Lagare CH, Souza AL. Searching for Control; Priming Randomness Increases the Evaluation of Ritual Efficacy. Cognitive Science, August 13, 2013. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cogs.12077/abstract .

7. Hahn M. Corporate Culture as Rites and Ceremonials. Articles Gratuits blog, April 21, 2007. http://en.articlesgratuits.com/corporate-culture-as-rites-and-ceremonials-id1519.php . Accessed May 28, 2015.

8. Warrillow J. The Secret Rituals and Traditions That Bring Teams Together. CBS News. December 23, 2010. www.cbsnews.com/news/the-secret-rituals-and-traditions-that-bring  -teams-together/.

9. Neal J. Enlightened Organizations: Four Gateways to Spirit at Work. New York: Palgrave MacMillan; 2013.

10. The Matrix Group. Matrix Group’s X-Men Team Wins 2014 Pumpkin Carving Contest. Matrix Group blog. October 31, 2014. www.matrixgroup.net/news-events/news/2014/10/31/matrix-group%27s-x-men-team-wins-2014-pumpkin-carving-competition . Accessed May 28, 2015.