Incorporating Rituals into Your Company Culture

Happy Thursday and thank you for joining me for another edition of my LinkedIn Newsletter! My next interview for my Newsweek series, Better, takes place on LinkedIn today at 12pm EST/9am PT/5pm GMT - this time, I’ll be speaking with New York Times bestselling author Steven Kotler to talk about the art of impossible and his new book of the same name. Join us today and bring your questions from Steven, as we take them live from the comments! For a quick calendar reminder to join us, click here.

In case you can’t sit in on the interview today, you can always watch the replays on my YouTube page, which archives all of the interviews in this series. You can even get notifications emailed to you when the newest episodes are online by subscribing to my channel.

A lot of the past year has felt haphazard and in disarray, with teams and leaders alike feeling uncertain of their place within their company working from home. Last week, Erica Keswin, a workplace strategist expert, shared with me the power of rituals in the workplace, with great insights into how the incorporation of rituals can center a team and strengthen their sense of community. These are a few highlights from our conversation, and if you’d like to watch the interview in its entirety, click here. 

The inherent value of rituals:

“Rituals ground us and bring some order out of chaos. Many people have felt really chaotic during these very turbulent times. Rituals give us what I call the 3P's. They give us a sense of psychological safety and belonging. They give us an opportunity to connect back to purpose and our values, and you add those two pieces together and you get the third P, which is performance. When we have rituals in our lives, our cortisol or stress goes down. Our oxytocin, that feel good hormone in our bodies, goes up. We feel better, we feel safer, we feel more connected. At work, what we find is that when you work for an organization where you're connected to purpose and values, collaboration and productivity goes up.” 

The virtue in leadership vulnerability:

“If you're a leader, I would urge you to think about this: How can you bring yourself? How can you be vulnerable? Now we're seeing into each other's homes for better or for worse. I think that from a human perspective and a business perspective, it’s about time, quite frankly, to not be in a position we're checking our real self at the door.

Many young people here living in teeny little spaces, their desk and their bed is in the same room. And they think that for their manager or their leader that nothing bad is going on in their life. Like they've got it all figured out. We all know that that's not true. 

If you can lead by example and share that the good and the bad, you're much more likely to get the people on your team to share as well.”

Including rituals around diversity and inclusion:

“Rituals can be great for improving diversity and inclusion, and if we're not intentional, it can have the opposite effect. So what do I mean? If you're managing a team or a department and all of your rituals are around drinking, make sure you have mocktails, make sure that everything that you're doing is not around alcohol. Make sure that your rituals are not always after five o'clock. Given now that we're all home, the workday has expanded. 

If all of your rituals are at six o'clock at night, for any time zone you're in, many people are not going to want to lean into that. I would also say that thinking about rituals in your employee resource groups could be another interesting opportunity around inclusion.”

Thank you so much for reading this week’s newsletter. Please leave a comment and share! Next week, I’ll be talking with branding and culture transformation expert Martin Lindstrom about overcoming stupid bureaucracy at work. Add it to your calendar now!

Wishing you health and success - 

Dorie