Culture can be a funny thing, as while it is widely believed to be an important element of employee engagement and retention, if it’s taken too far it can easily become insular and homogenous. Rituals seem to be at the forefront of this, as they exist precisely to bond people together, but to an outsider can appear peculiar.
Research from Harvard Business School explores the value of rituals, and finds that whether we love or hate them, they can actually create sufficient bonds between workers to produce a 16% boost to how meaningful we regard our work. What’s more, people who engage in rituals were also more likely to go the extra mile and generally exhibit greater “organizational citizenship”.
Happier and more productive
This boost to morale and citizenship then tends to translate into happier and more productive workers, which in turn boosts the profitability of organizations.
It’s a finding that the researchers believe should prompt employers to do more to encourage rituals, especially as they were found to be useful even for employees who resisted participating.
“Despite the fact that they think the thing is ridiculous, it can over time start to mean something to them, and they then feel differently about their coworkers and their work,” the authors explain.
Core elements
The researchers found that most group rituals tend to have three main elements to them. They are typically psychological, communal, and physical.
“Rituals have a physical element—some specific words or actions—and group rituals also have a communal element, meaning that we’re all doing it together at the same time,” the researchers explain. “The psychological element is where it gets that symbolic feeling. It feels good to do this in the specific way that we do it. And if we don’t do it the way we do it, we can feel a little bit off.”
When done well, rituals help to impart meaning, but doing them well is by no means easy. The researchers provide a number of steps that managers can take:
- Observe – The first step is to fully understand what people are doing already. For instance, monitor how people behave in meetings or in other organizational “set pieces” to try and understand pre-existing norms.
- Ensure it’s employee-driven – The authors urge managers to ensure that employees are encouraged to develop their own rituals, with these ideally building on things they already enjoy doing together.
- Give support – If rituals already exist, then provide help to support them, whether in terms of time or money.
“It’s not that we do rituals and then, magically, we like doing our work later that day,” the authors conclude. “It’s that over time, rituals themselves become meaningful to us—a sense of ‘this is how we do things around here.’ And that meaning is then linked to find more meaning in the work that we do.”
