A Ritual for Getting Your Team Culture, in Line

Are you looking for a way to spice up your meeting icebreakers? Are you tired of the “favorite ice cream flavor” warm-ups? Do you want to bring your team closer together and promote vulnerability?

Our ritual design ideation.

Our team¹ at the Stanford d.school (Scaling Org Culture) has designed a ritual to encourage camaraderie, empathy, and understanding for teams of any size. Our ritual is a beginning of meeting check-in or exercise challenging participants to put their feelings and experiences, big and small, “on the line.”

Our goal was to create an activity where teammates would be able to learn about each other outside the workspace and even to get a pulse check for how teammates are feeling. In helping to humanize each other outside of turning out product/work, we hope that team members will be able to better support each other. Through a scale exercise where colleagues physically line up from 1–10 in line based on their response to a question, team members will have the opportunity to share out, learn more about one another, and dive deeper with the option to chat one on one. Here are a few simple steps to get this started on your team.

Ritual Flow

1. Start with a member of the leadership team leading by example. Each time the group meets, the “queen of the question” will rotate. This person will be in charge of proposing the topic of conversation for the week. The “queen of the question” will ask a question, with a scale of 1–10 on opposite sides of the room. We recommend questions that would offer insight into a peers life outside of work, an example list is provided below:

I’m excited for next week.

I am proud of my accomplishments thus far.

I am excited for what my future has in store for me.

I’m still thinking about the last mistake I made.

I feel comfortable with the person I am in our workspace.

I’m actively trying to change my behavior/an aspect of myself.

2. The team members will close their eyes, hold up their numbers, and then move along the 1–10 scale.

3. Team members will be prompted to share their answers with the group. Consider, as the leadership or manager, sharing first to help create a safe space.

4. After the first session, consider giving gift cards on a monthly basis to team members to ask out their colleagues on “platonic dates” to dive deeper into the reflections they shared with the group.

5. Be sure to assign a “queen of the question” for the following week and continue the ritual with joy!

How to Adapt?

In person

• Large team — If the team is large, have the team write out their number on a piece of paper and then do a rotating share out or turn to a partner.
• Physical constraint — If the team is unable to move along the 1–10 scales, team members can anonymously write their numbers on post-its or pieces of paper. Then, members can put the numbers on a scale on a nearby surface and begin discussions.

On Zoom

• Small team — Have people close their eyes and hold up a number then share out.
• Large team — Open breakout rooms for groupings of numbers. Then, participants can join a breakout group to discuss before returning to the main room.

Let us know if you have any suggestions or feedback!

[1] Team members: Emma Hou, Peyton Klein, Eleanor Peng, Jarren Reid, Natalie Zerra