Erica believes rituals may be the key to transforming your company and creating workplace magic. We talked with her about what a ritual really is, and how to utilize them to improve your team’s performance as well as your own quality of life.
“There are three component parts. First, it’s something to which we assign a certain amount of meaning or intention. Second, there’s typically a cadence: once a day, week, year… You think about inauguration - happens every four years. There’s a regular cadence. The third part is really interesting - and something I didn’t think about or understand until I was in the science. A ritual is something that goes beyond its practical purpose. Let’s say I’m in my home office and the lights go out, so I light a candle to create some light. That’s not a ritual, it’s just functional. Now, let’s say I light a candle every day at 5 pm to signify the end of the work day: that’s a ritual.”
Erica says it’s likely you already have a ritual - or several - at work in your company.
“When I think about the women in the WIE Suite, this would be a really important question to ask themselves and the women who work for them. When do you feel the most [Your Company]-ish? When do you feel most LinkedIn-ish?” Does the question evoke remembering how you open each staff meeting, or an annual event, or something that happens during orientation?
Everytime I asked that, people were like ‘I’ve got it! I know what our ritual is. We’ve never called it that, but that’s what it is.”
When Rachel worked with KIND brand, she asked Daniel Lubetzky, Founder (and, at the time, CEO), “When do you feel most KIND-ish?” and he told a story about something that happened during each and every orientation. During onboarding, he shared a really important story about the founding of KIND and how his father had been saved by the kindness of strangers during the Holocaust, and he always wanted to pay that kindness forward - that became the company’s key value.
“Another way to know if something is a ritual is that people would miss it if you didn’t do it; there was never a KIND onboarding where this didn’t happen.” Erica explains.
Erica’s interest in rituals - and their power to unify teams with a sense of shared purpose - began long ago. “I wrote a book in 2018 called Bring Your Human to Work about how to create a more human workplace in a way that’s not only good for people but good for business. A couple years after it came out, I was on the upper west side with a colleague at this Italian restaurant we go to once a month when she’s in town, and enjoy a glass of red wine. We were talking about the feedback on the work. I had this epiphany that all the people I had interviewed for the book had told me about how they created a more human workplace - and as they did, they were telling me about rituals. They weren’t calling them rituals, but that’s what the examples they told me about really were. Things they did during meetings, things they did to recognize and celebrate milestones. I was like ‘Oh my God! They’re really talking about rituals!’ This glass of wine at this Italian restaurant with this friend was a ritual. For whatever reason, we went to the same restaurant to talk about work each month. From that moment, I started researching and looking into the science of rituals. Lots of times people think about rituals in their personal lives, but not in the workplace. I started looking at both, and the science is the same. Based on the research, I came up with an equation called the 3 Ps of rituals. These three Ps are what rituals give us, whether in our personal life, work life, or otherwise.”
Psychological Safety & Belonging + An Opportunity to Connect to Purpose = Increased Performance
“Psychological safety and belonging is huge at work. When people feel that, collaboration goes up and turnover goes down. All these metrics show that workplaces with these increased ‘Ps’ are good for the bottom line. If rituals give us the 3 Ps, and the 3 Ps lead to better business results, I wanted to understand what companies were doing around their rituals.”
Many leaders ask Erica where to start. “Beginnings and endings are prime ritual real estate.” She advises. “The beginning or ending of a project, a meeting, or a day. Any beginning or ending!”
“When you’re in a team and people feel connected, and psychological safety is present, you’re much more likely to be open, honest, to tell people when you disagree and avoid groupthink,” Erica expressed. Recently, she’s seen a lot of leaders use rituals as a way of checking in with their teams. “Let’s say you’re having a team meeting, and you’ve got to get down to business, but at the same time you want to check in with each person and see how everyone is showing up that day. It’s a great opportunity to build in a ritual in a way that takes the pulse of how people are showing up. Especially coming off the pandemic, when many leaders were checking in 24/7, it’s important to maintain the connection. It’s important to check in, but we need to get on with it. We don’t want to go back to March of 2020, but we can’t forget aspects of what we learned, felt, and saw.” She continues, “Rituals to the rescue. You can leverage rituals to bring connection with your team.”
As an example, Erica says leaders can prompt employees by saying, “Give me one word that describes how you’re showing up today.” Expanding on how meaningful and informative this small shift can be, Erica continues, “It provides a moment to connect. It gives the leader a few things. If they’re open minded and thinking beyond the words, they can learn a lot. If they do this every week for six weeks and every team member is giving you words like great, amazing, couldn’t be better… If that’s true for everyone every time, you probably don’t have a culture where people can be open and honest. At the same time, if someone gives a word that describes that a mess is happening in their life today, you’re not going to solve that in the meeting, but the ritual has opened your eyes and ears to it, so you can call that person and connect one-on-one on a deeper level. You can ritualize a team check in, then use that as an opportunity to follow up and connect more deeply.”
Erica continues, emphasizing, “The ritual is a way to take the pulse and provide a feeling of belonging and connection.” It’s not the end of the process. “They’re one tool for leaders to help employees feel connected to each other and to them as a leader - to help employees feel connected to the organization as a whole.”
On an individual level, rituals can help to decrease stress and increase mindfulness and calm.
“On the personal level, I like to ask people ‘What do you do in your life that makes you feel most like you?’ I think we as individuals can use rituals most in areas related to mental health, wellness, and managing all the stress.”
Personally, Erica is partial to her morning coffee ritual. “There’s no practical purpose - I don’t really need the caffeine. I used to go to Starbucks every day, get my overpriced coffee, sit with my moleskine notebook doing my to-do list, feeling like a million bucks checking off all the boxes by 8 am. But one day I realized my coffee was gone and I hadn’t even really tasted it. I look forward to that coffee and I had missed it!” Erica decided it was time for a change - and perhaps this was an opportunity for a ritual!
“I shifted away from just downing the coffee and jumping into my list. Now, I get the coffee, take a couple deep breaths, and feel the heat on my hands. There’s a real connection between rituals and senses - hearing, smelling, feeling. I bring my awareness to the present moment, which enables me to better start my day. It’s about bringing something that’s unconscious - back of the brain - to the front of the brain. It’s saying ‘I am here in this moment.’”
“Rituals at work?? What are you talking about??” Erica has heard that a lot. “People have said, ‘I have no idea what that looks like, feels like, or means.’ Sometimes people think rituals are just religious. There’s a misconception between something being a ritual versus being a habit; this is where intentionality comes in. It’s about conscious versus unconscious.”
Bringing rituals into the workplace can be a delicate process. “I always tell leaders, if you hear about a cool ritual that a company does, and you want to try it, but it doesn’t stick, you need to move on. You can’t force feed a ritual. There’s almost a viral nature to a ritual. They are top-down, bottom-up, and inside-out. They can come from anywhere, they’re highly accessible and they don’t need to cost anything. They might! Your annual celebration might cost something, but they don’t need to. Sometimes an amazing ritual is a volunteer day! That’s a great opportunity to connect while doing good and being aligned to your values.”
If you try something new, be attentive to feedback, and adapt quickly. “If you get an eye roll, you get people not showing up, et cetera… let it go! You are always going to have an eye roller or a naysayer, but there I lead with the data on how rituals can improve our working experiences as a team. Then, I ask for an easy commitment. I say we’re going to have a ritual for ten minutes, try something new for several weeks in a row, and vote on what works.”
You can learn more about rituals at work in Erica Keswin’s book, Rituals Roadmap, or find more resources at her website https://ericakeswin.com/.
Lauren Lyddon has helped people and organizations to tell their stories for more than a decade. Having tested her love of the creative through the pursuit of an MBA and undergraduate business degrees, she is a writer, editor, and lover of fiction in all its forms (especially theatre, well-written television, and novels). A West coast resident often operating on an East coast schedule, Lauren uses her business background and love of story to serve clients in writing, editing, PR, and more. You can visit her online at L2crtv.com.
