Rituals Roadmap summary

One of the best-known ceremonies in the world is the Olympic torch relay. It starts in Greece, and dozens of athletes take turns carrying the torch to whichever city is hosting the games. This ritual brings participants together in a shared celebration of fair sportsmanship. It elevates the event and gives it greater philosophical meaning. 

You can do something very similar with your workday. 

Look at your calendar for the day. How many meetings are on it? Nancy Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School, estimates that roughly 11 million work meetings happen in the US every day. Unfortunately, too often these meetings are, at best, unproductive – and, at worst, lead to lost revenue. 

According to Doodle, an online meeting tool, in 2019 the value of productivity lost due to meetings was close to $400 billion. 

We all know that water coolers are magical. They create conversations that give employees new strength and a sense of purpose. As MIT professor Alex Pentland wrote in his well-known essay “The Water Cooler Effect,” this kind of informal workplace socializing bonds groups and ultimately increases productivity. 

How can your company leverage this magic? Well, a 2015 study from the Cornell School of Management showed one easy solution: a communal workplace lunch. Eating together is quintessentially human – after all, most modern rituals do revolve around food. So far, however, the corporate environment has been slow to catch up. Lunch is often seen as something mundane – just an hour off, nothing to do with business. 

In 2013, TIME Magazine ran a cover feature on millennials. The title was scathing: “The Me Me Me Generation.” Older people often feel that millennials require a lot of handholding and recognition. But really, millennials just want to be seen.

And the generation that came after the Millennials – so-called Generation Z – is not dissimilar. Recent studies show that 40 percent of Gen-Zers prefer daily interactions with their boss. Sixty percent want multiple weekly check-ins with their team leader. Ninety-seven percent expect feedback after completing a major project. Taken together, this all shows that workers do not want to be seen just as cogs in the machine. Instead, millennials and Gen-Zers want appreciation for all the effort that they put in. 

One ritual that has really permeated the culture these days comes from Marie Kondo. It’s useful when you want to tidy up your home. Kondo says that you should hold up an object you own and ask yourself whether it sparks joy. If not, thank the item for trying – and then get rid of it. The takeaway here is that rituals help us say goodbye. 

A similar approach can also work in your professional life. Whether you’re ending a big project, a work position, a long day, or a stressful quarter, a parting ritual can help you find closure and set you off on the right foot for your next endeavor. 

In the previous blinks, you’ve read a lot about how simple rituals can improve everyday life in the office. But the coronavirus pandemic has changed our lives dramatically. It’s blurred the line between work and home. So have rituals died off with morning commutes? Far from it. 

Instead, they’ve stepped in to help us deal with the new normal. In New York City, residents began a daily banging of pots and pans outside their windows to salute their healthcare workers. Families across the world began doing Zoom trivia nights, and a lot of people started to experiment with mindfulness.