Do You Celebrate Humanity In Your Workplace?

This recent Harvard Business Review piece got me a little choked-up. Truly. HBR usually works on my mind, not my heart. But this article on the need for celebratory rituals at work reminded me of what I believe is the most neglected fact in business: we're all human. Yet, we often forget this -- especially when people are going through career transitions.

Historically, society created rites of passage, festivals, and celebrations to mark births, puberty, graduations, weddings, and funerals to help people through common transitions. And, with average longevity at 47-years-old in 1900, middle age wasn't even a consideration. But, as U.S. longevity nears 80-years-old today, midlife is a multi-decade period chock full of transitions. It's time we started developing proper rituals -- in and out of the workplace and beyond a gold watch on retirement day -- for a variety of reasons.

First, midlife has become a marathon. The Oxford Dictionary defines middle age as 45-65. But those linguistic scholars don’t live in Silicon Valley, where people start feeling old in their mid-30s. Same with many in the retail, advertising and fashion industries. As power in a digital society cascades younger, and more of us are going to make it to 100, it might be that midlife lasts from 35-75. Our 50s may not just be midlife, but might be mid-career. Midlife in the modern day can feel like a run-on sentence without punctuation. Adding some celebratory rituals could add just the punctuation we need to experience our humanity in what’s now a longer story.

Secondly, career transitions are happening more often as we no longer graduate from college and stay in the same job for a few decades. Changing a job can be stressful and, if you’re married to your work, leaving a job can feel a lot like a divorce. You’re leaving a community of coworkers you’ve likely spent more time with than you have with your own family. And some stressful transitions can happen even without leaving your company. So, imagine a first-time manager going through some simple ritual to provide psychological and spiritual support to understand her new role with more clarity. Or, sending off a 65-year-old leaving a company -- not to retire but to pursue a master’s degree -- and marking his transition with a commencement ceremony.

Thirdly, the more digital we get, the more ritual we need. While we’re awash in URLs, what we could really use are more IRLs (in real life) rituals. I’m a longtime proponent of festival experiences for the “collective effervescence” that can only be felt in person. The fact is that festivals have made a huge comeback at a time when we’re evermore attached to our “smart, but not so smart phones.” As humans, we need to give the mirror neurons in our brains an opportunity to play with each other, which doesn’t happen with a text, tweet, or even a video call. It’s ironic that many Silicon Valley midlifers -- thirsting for community in a work environment that can feel anything but human -- make the annual pilgrimage to the Nevada desert for the Burning Man festival -- a rite of passage to “burn” the old and start with a fresh beginning.

So, how do we encourage more rituals celebrating our humanity in the workplace? As the HBR piece suggests, “If we are to be more flexible in the workplace, if we are indeed going to be perpetual beginners, then we need to become much better at endings, and so do our organizations. Work can’t be meaningful if we can’t honor endings and if we are not offered spaces to do so.” So, how do we chronicle both beginnings and endings in a more festive way? In my leadership role at Airbnb, I was impressed with how teams were aware of employee anniversary dates and their impromptu afternoons celebrating their fellows. (This is actually simple to execute and just requires a friendly alert from the HR department.)

The end of my four years at Airbnb (I’m now a strategic advisor) coincided with our bi-annual gathering in San Francisco. We call this company love-fest “One Airbnb.” On the last night of the three-day tribal gathering, I was offered 20 minutes to share some wisdom to nearly 3,000 employees from 22 offices around the world (we had grown from 400 employees in just four years). I gave a commencement-like speech that night. Yet, ironically, as co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky suggested in his introduction, I was the one graduating onto something new.

There’s an old African proverb that when an elder dies, it’s like a library has burned down. In the context of a company, when someone retires or leaves after many years of service, all that institutional wisdom essentially walks out the door. Australia’s University of Sydney created a Living Library where, instead of borrowing a book, you borrow a person. Reading becomes a conversation with a living book. They can be borrowed for a session to share chapters of their life and a catalogue is available to search for subjects relevant to the borrower’s interests. How about each time someone leaves your company, you convene a Living Library where the person leaving offers a few meaningful stories from their tenure and everyone else gets to “read” each other in recognition of their collective humanity?

Not long ago, my friend Marianna Leuschel -- in her late 50s -- was winding down her successful design and consulting firm. She knew she needed to make a clear break from the past and transition into that liminal space that anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who popularized the idea of rites of passage in indigenous society, called the “threshold,” the uncomfortable space of being in-between two phases of your life.

Marianna decided to have a Closing Ceremony at a bucolic cemetery where she rented the beautiful memorial services space. She invited every person who had worked for her over her 20 years in business, as well as friends and family, to come celebrate. She said something brief about each person, and how they had touched her along the way, starting with her first employee and ending with her mother (the instigator of her creative life). She hoped that the community created through the work of her small studio would continue to live on, in some form, and that it would always be a part of her. It has. After a sabbatical that had no determined end date, she’s going back to the part of her job she enjoyed the most -- helping clients with brand strategy and storytelling work -- without the worries of running a larger studio.

An ending foreshadows a beginning, so I offer this wise poem as a reminder that celebrating one era allows you to become unstuck and go boldly forward with what’s next in your life.

For a New Beginning

by John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,

Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,

Noticing how you willed yourself on,

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety

And the gray promises that sameness whispered,

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,

Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And out you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream,

A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

Chip Conley is a New York Times best-selling author and veteran hospitality executive who renewed himself in midlife by collaborating with the Millennial co-founders of Airbnb to create the world’s largest global hospitality brand. His new book, Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder, is now available.