6 Methods for Shaping Your Company Culture Through Rituals

Are rituals a part of your company culture? The idea might sound cultish, but the power of rituals runs deep in cultures across the globe. From the Haka war dance of New Zealand’s national rugby team, the All Blacks, to the maypole dance of Swedish girls on Midsummer Eve, rituals provide a sense of identity, support our values, and give us purpose and structure. 

Without them, we lose our sense of connection. In the workplace, culture can be shaped and purpose can be defined through organizational rituals. Here are six ways you can develop and maintain the rituals that will bring your team together.

Define Your Values

Rituals not only who we are, but who we wish to become. By packaging aspects of your company culture into rituals, you make your culture easier to define and transmit to others.

The Ritz Carlton Hotel Company does this with a daily ritual called the Daily Line-Up of its employees in which they review and reaffirm the company’s values.

The interaction lasts only a few minutes, but that’s enough to bring the values back to the forefront of everyone’s mind and reinforce the message: “These are our values and today is a new opportunity to practice them.”

Design Your Rituals

If you’re a sports fan, you know your team’s rituals. While these rituals may feel organic, they were likely born by marketing teams to strengthen engagement with the team brand. Rituals like the “Terrible Towel” of the Pittsburgh Steelers were carefully designed and executed.

What rituals are currently in place in your business? How does your organization introduce its culture to new employees? How do you celebrate transitions from one job to the next or to express gratitude, or praise? Each of these is a ritual that you can design and promote to communicate what’s important to your team.

Use the Right Ingredients

You probably have more rituals in place than you realize, but do they work? For a ritual to be a positive force in your business, it should have the following ingredients:

• Purpose
• Repetition
• Practicality

Purposeful rituals reinforce shared values. It is a purpose that differentiates a routine activity and a ritual. The repetition of rituals conveys the message that they represent core beliefs in your organization. Finally, if rituals are practical, they will be simple and accessible to everyone. If actions are too complex, the likelihood of regular ritual practice and buy-in drops significantly. 

Be a Champion for Change

Changing the course of your company through rituals may not take a decade, but it will be gradual. You may encounter resistance to a new ritual, so you will need to convince your internal leaders to champion the new initiative.

Once the first round of rituals takes root, you can add a new layer of rituals, and then another, building to the point where your culture automatically expresses itself through rituals.

Eventually, you will reach a time when you no longer need to add new rituals and can instead focus on the health of those you already have in place.

Strike a Balance

The size and frequency of rituals vary with their purpose. As the architect of your rituals, you must understand when, where, and how often they should occur to be effective.

Persistent rituals set the tone for both customers and employees. Daily rituals are lightweight reminders that frame the environment and workload for the day. Weekly rituals follow a regular schedule and may require more time, effort and thought. Monthly rituals are generally events lasting an hour or more that require active participation and preparation. Annual rituals are landmark moments for the business that occupy the entire company’s attention.

Nurture Your Rituals

As you deploy your business rituals, you will need an effective way to measure them and nurture their success. If you kick off a ritual that doesn’t land, just kill it. There is nothing more corrosive than a forced and inauthentic ritual.

If you don’t regularly assess the impact of rituals on your culture, your company can begin to drift. The farther out you drift, the more resources you’ll need to correct problems. To prevent this, make a plan to improve your culture through rituals that outlines a phased approach and then track your progress as you start taking action.

This article was adapted from the book, A CEO Only Does Three Things, written by Trey Taylor. Trey Taylor is the managing director of trinity | blue, a consultancy designed to provide executive coaching and strategic planning to C-Suite leaders.