How we (re)designed our community rituals

Senior Product Designer, Annette Lay, and Design Operations Coordinator, Ekaterina Klykova, take an in-depth look at our team rituals — from their design to their necessary evolution in the face of a pandemic.

“We shape our tools. And then our tools shape us” — Marshall McLuhan

Rituals are tools designed to enhance our lives. Whether it’s a morning meditation, a 20-minute workout, or a moment of gratitude or prayer before bed, we consciously create rituals based on specific needs, in specific moments, to preserve a state of mind and create a sense of grounding.

Much like personal rituals, scalable rituals are vital to the happiness and productivity of teams and communities. Many of us know the standard ways of working — stand-ups, design critiques, weekly team meetings, etc. — but every organisation and team is unique, and as such their rituals should be, too. Taking a one-size-fits-all approach to ritual design doesn’t always add value. We knew that customisation was key when we set out to design rituals for our own community.

Tailoring rituals to your team

In the fall of 2019, our Product Insights & Design team had recently scaled to over 100 members in three locations. We needed to design rituals that could accommodate our community’s different needs as it grew.

From the get-go, our overarching intention was to create new and update current rituals that would encourage productivity and spark happiness within our community. Both were seen as being equally important to the well-being of individual employees as well as the larger team.

This step-by-step guide details how we designed our new rituals toolkit:

Step 1: Check the temperature of the room

To gauge the “temperature in the room” we conducted one-on-one employee interviews, pulled information from recent culture engagement surveys, and sent out a questionnaire which included queries such as:

• How would you describe the design community at Zalando?
• What are some of the positive moments you’ve had with the design community? Why were they impactful?
• What is missing from or lacking in the design community? What would you like to see more of?

Step 2: Surface recurring themes

Though everyone had unique feedback, certain themes emerged across different teams and locations. Celebration was one such theme. The following quotes highlighted a desire to celebrate our achievements:

“When I first started, everybody was so supportive and so proud to show me what they have been working on to try and help during the onboarding stage.”

“More pride in design work that we do.”

“More celebration of the work being done”

“I think we could do more to a) celebrate our work, and b) distribute our expertise better amongst each other.”

Step 3: Synthesise & create design principles

Based on these themes and insights, we synthesised six key design principles to guide the creation of our community rituals: Connect, Celebrate, Inspire, Grow, Create, and Share.

Step 4: Design the rituals!

With our principles in place, we looked at how other companies that inspire us motivate their teams, and identified existing rituals that already worked well. For example, we consolidated various teams’ stand-up structures into one, more efficient version.

We clustered rituals into two categories: Team Rituals and Community Rituals. Here are some examples of some rituals we love:

Step 5: Weaving the toolkit together

When building the toolkit, we took a few things into consideration:

Who is it for?
All employees in the Product Insights & Design community, but we wrote it with new hires in mind as it constitutes part of their onboarding process.

What’s the best format?
Since we wanted it to be a living document that other colleagues could add their own rituals to, we designed it in Google Slides.

How can we make it engaging?
To avoid making our rituals feel like chores we kept the language, tone, and design playful and inclusive.

Redefining our rituals

In the months since the release of our rituals toolkit, significant changes altered the Product Insights & Design team’s make-up and working set up.

• We grew to 150 permanent employees, and absorbed a new team (Product Analytics) after an internal restructure
• Due to the pandemic, the community had to work fully remotely from late March 2020

Although change is something we embrace and plan for at Zalando, it’s fair to say that nobody could have foreseen the unprecedented events of 2020. We needed a working model that was even more flexible to ensure that our team stayed healthy and happy.

In August, after evaluating attendance, agendas, and event cancellations to measure team engagement, it was clear that our original rituals were no longer meeting the needs of the community. To find out more, we sent out a survey asking further questions and floating new ideas and potential solutions. We followed up with a round of in-person interviews.

Overall, we were able to identify two clear community needs:

1. Socialising & bonding

62% of the community told us that they missed socialising. People missed “low-energy fun events” and “having fun together,” Fun is a pretty personal concept, but follow-up interviews revealed that team members wanted the chance to have more casual chats with colleagues as well as space to share more of their lives.

To tackle this issue, we introduced a new Random Coffee ritual where people can grab a coffee and have an informal virtual chat with a group of randomly selected colleagues once a week.

2. Knowledge exchange

Over 51% of the community lamented the decline in learning opportunities since the pandemic began. With our rapid growth, it had become difficult to keep up to date on each other’s projects, and there were now fewer external learning opportunities available.

So we turned our gaze inward. The design team is made up of staggeringly talented professionals from whom we can learn so much — so why not formalise this? We created Ask Me Anything sessions to allow our design managers to impart their knowledge on the community.

We also consolidated internal share-outs, upskilling workshops, and external talks into one unified ritual, Friday Specials. Now, without having to join three separate meetings, our design community comes together once a week at the same time to socialise and exchange knowledge.

Our shiny, newly updated Rituals toolkit currently has a selection of remote events on personal, team, and larger community levels, and we’re thinking about organising a design meetup and round tables in the future. Most importantly, taking on the unexpected shifted our focus and now flexibility and inclusion play a fundamental role in all of our rituals.

We’re actively looking for creative, empathic, and collaborative candidates to join our team. If you’re a talented individual who also wants to be a force for good in the fashion world, apply to one of our open positions!