Humanizing Hybrid Work with Rituals

Designing Culture Practices for Hybrid Teams, Serendipitous Interactions, and Constructive Conflict

How can work teams develop a good culture in our newly hybrid world? Organizations are increasingly having to figure out not just how to develop good virtual team work, but how to deal with a mix of in person and online team members. Rituals are one approach to developing cultural practices to increase people’s sense of satisfaction, meaning, and performance at work.

I have been researching the emerging virtual rituals that have been developed in the coronavirus era, and last year I got a chance to do some design workshops that focus particularly on building better organizational culture for hybrid teams.

Professor Bob Sutton invited me to run a series of ritual design sessions as part of their Leading Organizational Change class at Stanford. This was my second time collaborating with them in this class. This time though, the class was virtual, and the focus was on helping our partner Stanford HR team with the challenges of hybrid work life. We were lucky enough to have Elizabeth Zacharias, Marguerite Kunze, and Melissa McVicker from the Stanford HR team. Throughout this mini project, they helped us scope the design challenge, talk to students as end users, and give feedback to their ideas at the end.

Hybrid Work Challenges

As a part of the design sessions, we helped lead the student teams through discovery research about the challenges that organizations fac e when trying to build culture in this virtual an d hybrid era.

As we were talking to our partner, one major theme we heard was that humanizing virtual work is an overarching challenge. When we dug deeper, some sub-themes reveal themselves:

The first one is about the hybrid work possibilities when the pandemic ends. What would happen when some employees are at the office, others are remote, and some others are in-between? How do you make sure it’s a fair inclusive culture? How do you facilitate collaboration and create a sense of belonging? I

Another distinct theme is the lack of serendipitous interactions for creativity and collaboration. When interactions are reduced to Zoom meetings, how do you create water cooler conversations without addingZoom fatigue? How do you facilitate collaboration when communication channels are scattered, people are in both virtual and office spaces?

A third emerging theme is the need for constructive conflict. As we are settling in with hybrid work, some relationships are deteriorating with the friction that comes with demanding timelines and poor communication. Hybrid work decreased the bandwidth for relationship repair and pushed work relationships toward transactional interactions.

5 Hybrid Work Ritual Ideas

After we did the discovery work and uncovered these themes, we then moved to generate possible new interventions, with a focus on new cultural practices for teams in this virtual and hybrid situation.

Students formed teams of four, and then interviewed partners on hybri d teams in depth, with a focus on these themes of serendipitous interactions, and constructive conflict. The teams then followed a ritual design process to uncover key insights and create possible news rituals. The rituals they designed are as follows:

1. Where’s Your Head At?

Where’s Your Head At is a hybrid work ritual to facilitate an equitable work environment, by people sharing their location and emotional state that it evokes.

Trigger moment (when this ritual will take place): Beginning of meeting with small or medium-sized groups (6–15) attending from work and from home

Intent: Equalizing the experience of people who are attending the same meeting virtually from home versus on campus by fostering empathy

Ritual Flow

1. Moderator gives instructions: in under 1 minute, everyone will share a word to describe the location they are joining the meeting from, as well as a backstory to why they chose this word. Words can be descriptors of the physical location or how the location makes them feel.
2. Moderator will go first with their word and backstory to give an example.
3. Everyone shares their word and backstory to the others in the meeting.
4. Either share in alphabetical order or moderator picks on people in the order that they appear on their screen
5. Alphabetical order will prevent nervousness, give people more space to listen instead of preparing their own stories.
6. After everyone shares, the moderator will give the group 30 seconds to reflect on where everyone else is currently located and the challenges/emotions this may add to their job. For example: working from home can be difficult with small children while working in person can be difficult because of the commute and cost of living/transportation.

2. Keep Calm and Zoom On

Keep Calm and Zoom on is a hybrid work ritulal to facilitate an inclusive work environment by people taking a pause andbreathing together.

Trigger moment: Very beginning of a meeting when people are transitioning from previous commitments and are fatigued from a full day on Zoom.

Intent: Create an inclusive online environment where people have the opportunity to pause and reset during a stressful workday.

Ritual Flow

1. Once all participants have joined or 2 minutes have passed into the meeting (whichever happens first), tell everyone to turn their cameras on if they can and to mute their mics.
2. Acknowledge that it’s been a hectic day and everyone could use some calm, and propose a 2-minute meditation session.
3. Stress the importance of how helpful it will be to recharge them, and encourage everyone to put aside their busywork (replying to emails, checking their phone, etc.) — it can wait.
4. Then, either through a guided approach or coaching meditation platform such as Calm (share just audio, not video), help everyone work their way through the session, telling them to slowly release any stressors and to focus on the peace and quiet.
5. Once the session is over, ask everyone to slowly open their eyes, take a deep breath, and just be thankful for these small moments in our busy days that provide some sanity.

3. Mad Lib of The Day!

Mad Lib of the Day is a ritual to create serendipitous connections during meetings.

Trigger moment: Beginning of a meeting with 6–10 people

Intent: To help foster connections between people and introduce more spontaneity/laughter in conversations

Ritual Flow

1. Use a random adjective generator (https://www.randomlists.com/random-adjectives)
2. Pick one adjective out of this list of 12
3. In the chat of the meeting, each person answers the question “what is one ________ moment or event you experienced this week” using the chosen adjective
4. The host picks an individual to choose one moment that they want to hear about, and that person shares their story.
5. React in the chat, acknowledge that you are listening to people’s stories
6. Repeat step 4 for how long time allows.

4. Battle Bookends

Battle Bookends is a ritual to prevent conflicts before they happen by having emotional release moments.

Trigger moment: Start of a meeting (1–2 mins) End of a meeting (~5 mins left) when all task content has been covered

Intent: Provide a channel to facilitate the expression of frustration/concerns that arise during a meeting (and avoid escalation of conflict).

Ritual Flow

1. Before the meeting, designate the moderator for the meeting. It is recommended a moderator is a different person than the moderator of the previous meeting. Make the moderator position clear by a distinct Zoom background or pinning the person’s screen to the top.
2. Beginning of meeting (1 min) — One word for how you’re feeling, and one for how you hope you’ll feel at the end of the meeting. This is a time to put the past meeting behind you (acknowledge current feelings and try to not carry negative ones over to new meetings) and get into the mind-space of a new meeting.
3. Throughout the meeting, folks should feel free to message the moderator with any concerns/clarification questions they have. Is there a moment when you felt uncomfortable? Something you’d like to check in with someone about?
4. End of the meeting (4 min) — Mediator can highlight (anonymized) comments, with the goal of flagging items for follow-up and making the room’s feelings explicit. ,

5. Wine Hang

Wine Hang is a ritual to prevent conflicts before they happen by fostering trust with strong connections.

Trigger moment: Beginning of the week at a team meeting.

Intent: To boost people’s mood throughout the workweek and create a greater sense of community/trust.

Ritual Flow

1. At the beginning of the week, team leaders decide a 10-minute self-care activity to be done by each team member at some point during the week. Some examples: walks, meditations, (quick) healthy cooking, stretches, face masks, etc.
2. Each team member puts the exact time when they are going to be doing the activity in their calendar (which can be viewed by all other team members)
3. Team members can look for overlap in their self-care time and do the activity together.
4. Friday at the end of the week there is a short, reflective Wine Hang where team members can share how their self-care activity went, who they did it with, etc.
5. The goal is to boost positive team interaction, make calendars a little more inviting, proactively decrease conflicts before they happen, and start + end the week focusing on individual health.

Reflections

These first drafts of new rituals point to some promising directions for how people can build better hybrid work cultures. Here are the insights for new cultural practices for our post-Covid era:

Proactively Help Build Human Connection

Human connection is critical to establish a sustainable and satisfying hybrid work culture. Leaders and managers need to be proactive in facilitating human connection. Rituals can help you as they give you the permission to be intentional and explicit about relationship building. For example you can open your meetings with check-ins and end your meetings with reflections. Check-ins don’t have to be monotonous, you can spice them up with a check-in generator, or by introducing physical props from people’s physical environment. Reflection moments are good for reassurance, closure, and gratitude.

Create Opportunities To See and Be Seen

Rituals like Where’s Your Head At are more about people seeing each other holistically with emotions and their vulnerability. Opening up with your emotions needs some groundwork though. Managers and people in higher positions need to show vulnerability themselves to model behavior, so others can feel safe doing so.

Tap into Curiosity and Humor

Our warmup ritual exercise for Zoom fatigue generated several storytelling rituals where participants use stories as a way to rejuvenate and energize a team. Some of the stories were personal (like a Story Relay from past life), and some stories were probing popular culture (like the funniest news story from the past week) and aimed to evoke curiosity, humor, and even wonder. When designing activities, and practices for serendipitous interactions, tap into curiosity and humor to keep the vitality in the hybrid work life.

Preventative Relationship Repair

Similar to preventative healthcare, think about conflicts before they occur. Two rituals on constructive conflict illustrate a proactive approach to relationship repair. In the Battle Bookends, a moderator role is crafted to do an emotional pulse check of the team during meetings. In the Wine Hang, it’s about strengthening the personal 1–1 connections before conflicts occur. Find ways to strengthen relationships so people can go through hard times without fallouts.

What other rituals do you practice with your teams as you transition to hybrid work? Please share it in the comments. And if you like the article, clap 👏 below so others can find it.