Rituals are meaningful and deliberate activities your team establishes and performs regularly to foster shared culture, collaboration, and connectivity.
They help team members bond, enable newcomers to get initiated into your values, improve team cohesion and morale, drive psychological safety, and the social cohesion of teams. Team rituals also help people find more meaning in their work, as per a study by Kim et al (2021).
All rituals contribute to team cohesion, but some have different purposes than others. While some rituals (such as retrospectives) help enhance performance, others (such as Team Time) focus on connection between team members.
Rituals are especially important to have in distributed settings, where building and maintaining trust and connection requires us to be both deliberate and explicit.
To help you out, we have listed 5 ways to choose and schedule team rituals below:
1. Design your own rituals using our Worksheet
We created a free worksheet in partnership with Shayne Smart, Principal Consultant at workshop.design, to help you create rituals that work for your team (and even family, and any group/community you belong to, or are coaching).
2. Schedule Rituals with Aion’s ritual feature
We recently added a new ritual feature on Aion, our platform for team connection. This feature allows you to pick from a variety of rituals (taken from our ritual bank), and schedule the ritual of your choice by sending an invite to your team members.
Rituals are most beneficial when they are held on a regular basis (or have a specific cadence), and with this new feature, you can easily be more diligent in doing so.
3. Use Trello boards to keep track of your rituals (and to get inspired too!)
Trello is one of our favorite tools to keep track of our tasks. The platform can also help with rituals!
Here are two ways to do this:
Create a column in your board dedicated to rituals. Add a card for each ritual, where you detail the ritual, add any tasks related to it as a checklist as well as specify the next date where this event will be held.
Trello created a template board for a fun ritual called Gif Battle Game. Follow the instructions listed in the cards, and use it when you’re looking for a fun team time idea!
4. Organize team events with airbnb experiences
From mystery solving to cooking classes, Airbnb has a variety of offerings for team rituals, called Online Experiences. Check out their “Perfect For Team Building” section, find an activity your team would find fun, and book it! An experienced host will facilitate the session, and leave you all with great shared memories.
5. Scroll through our ritual bank for more ideas
If you’re looking for new ritual ideas, check out our ritual bank. It has over 40 ritual ideas under 5 categories: Community, Performance, Conflict Resolution, Innovation, and Onboarding. Choose the right filter depending on your objective for organizing a new team ritual, and find new ideas for your team to enjoy!
P.S: We also take suggestions in the ritual bank, so feel free to send yours if you have any!
We hope our suggestions will help you develop and sustain new rituals. For more ways to connect with your team, sign up to Aion today for free.