How Business and HR Leaders Use Rituals to Share Meaning and Shape Actions

By definition, a ritual is a solemn ceremony where meaningful actions are completed in a prescribed order. Rituals often commemorate transition events (births, birthdays, graduations, elections, marriages, funerals) and celebrate legacy values or core beliefs (e.g., Ramadan, Lent leading to Easter, and Passover religious observances, which overlap somewhat this year). ??

Rituals turn personal habits into realized values and guiding principles. Habits describe what people do; rituals shape how people think and feel about what they do. Habits come from automatic behaviors; rituals come from intentional behaviors. Habits show up in actions; rituals evoke purpose and meaning to clarify why actions occur. ????Our rituals include language, stories, actions, festivities, relationships, and places that imbue habits with meanings. For example, birthdays are often celebrated by having a party, being sung to, making a wish, and blowing out candles, all ritual parts of a U.S. birthday that represent hopes and dreams of a new year of growth and progress and good things to come.

In recent and forthcoming weeks, I have been and will be involved in many personal rituals (celebrating 50 years of marriage, attending funerals for friends and colleagues, learning about and participating in Ramadan customs, and honoring my faith traditions). As I reflect on the impact of personal rituals, let me suggest six ways to use the power of organizational rituals to help business and HR leaders deliver stakeholder value to all humans engaging with an organization.

1. Start with Purpose and Identity

Much like turning personal habits into rituals that define one’s identity (celebrating marriage in a particular place, breaking Ramadan fast with a festive meal (iftar), or observing Lent before Easter), conceiving organization routines (work processes and management actions) as rituals turns them into opportunities to articulate values and instill meaning (sometimes called stakeholder [conscious, responsible] capitalism or purpose [mission, values] driven organization).

With clarity about the organization purpose or identity, routines relate to longer-term values. For example, seeing the routines of hiring, promoting, or paying an employee as rituals increases a focus on organization meaning and purpose by exploring how such policies might help employees flourish, customers have a better experience, or communities prosper. Thinking about organization routines as rituals helps shape an enduring identity for the organization.

How well do I/we turn routines (work processes and management actions) into rituals that shape a values-based identity?

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2. Celebrate Progress

Personal rituals indicate growth (birthdays) or opportunities to continually make and celebrate progress (Ramadan, Easter, Passover). Casting organization celebration events as rituals connects discrete events to core values:

• Anniversary celebrations signal a dedication to long-term relationships.
• Unique market success celebrations indicate commitment to customer experience.
• Work titles, office spaces, meeting attendance, and other administrative tokens may be evidence of the culture or brand.
• Allocating decision rights based on performance become opportunities to communicate progress based on living core values.

Celebrating these progress events as rituals brings more meaning to them.

How well do I/we celebrate progress by ensuring that events have meaning for those involved?

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3. Share Stories

Personal rituals often get reinforced by sharing stories that enhance the meaning of the ritual. I recently was privileged to listen to Muslim colleagues share how they used Ramadan rituals as a way to bond with family and friends and to further their commitment to serving others. Likewise, organization stories can be shared to capture and reinforce key values. I have heard many such stories throughout my career including:

• The employee who returned a lost article to a customer’s home.
• The leader who attended to an employee’s family during a health crisis.
• The scientist or team who invented new products through breakthrough thinking.

These service, innovation, and collaboration stories turn capabilities into rituals that reflect sustainable values.

How well do I/we share stories of how capabilities reflect enduring values?

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4. Encourage Symbols as Signals

Personal rituals often show up in symbolic traditions that signal meaning. Ramadan includes fasting as a form of worship, spiritual discipline, and empathy for the poor. Easter eggs symbolize (re)birth, lilies hope and purity, and palm branches peace. Business and HR leaders also can intentionally use symbols to signal values:

• Clothing such as academic hoods for graduation, stickers or swag for athletic success, military decorations and medals, formal attire to symbolic events and places.
• Access to food and cafeteria norms where all employees gather together in one place to share meals.
• Other signals that share values: employee appreciation gifts, employee-of-the-month recognition, personal and public praise, service anniversary awards, etc.

When these symbolic acts become rituals, they communicate values and meaning.

How well do I/we use symbols to communicate values and share meaning?

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5. Set the Physical Setting

Personal rituals often have a physical component: faith observers attend church, mosque, or temple; funeral services include physical norms; marriages have many ritual norms (assigned seats, clothing, flowers, food). Physical settings can also communicate organization rituals:

• Open versus closed office space to signal work flow.
• Type of office décor (modern versus traditional, personal versus institutional, high- versus low-end furnishings) to communicate values.
• Layout of personal office to suggest values.

Physical settings can even be part of virtual events. When I do video conferences, I like to observe the pictures, books, and other items behind those online then ask them to tell a story about those artifacts. I have learned about people’s hobbies, heritage, and values through these stories.

How well do I/we manage the physical setting of work space to communicate what matters most?

6. Create Language

Personal rituals often have a unique (and boundary-defining) language. Ramadan includes words like Ramadan Mubarak (meaning blessed Ramadan), sawm (the Arabic word for fasting), iftar (the evening meal breaking the fast), suhoor (the pre-dawn meal), taqwa (piety or God-consciousness), hilal (the crescent moon signifying the start of Ramadan) and Eid (a celebration after Ramadan). Easter comes with words like resurrection (the central theme of Easter), crucifixion (referring to Jesus’ death on the cross), lamb (a traditional Easter food symbolizing sacrifice), atonement (being at one with Christ), grace (key Christian doctrine indicating the help of Christ), and salvation (act of being saved).

Language can also communicate rituals in organizations. Disney is a great example of unique language that communicates values:

• Cast members—not employees.
• On stage—not in the office.
• Guests—not customers or park visitors.
• Part of the show—not at work.

Such unique language reinforces the rituals of treating employees like customers and customers like employees to make Disney “the happiest place on earth.”

How can I/we communicate values through language?

Conclusion

In this season of personal rituals that turn habits into realized values, we can also benefit from thinking about how to also create organization rituals out of routines. Doing so embeds values and communicates meaning.

What are the rituals in your organization? What do they communicate? How do they get institutionalized?

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Dave Ulrich?is the Rensis Likert Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and a partner at The RBL Group, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations and leaders deliver value.