Think about all the routines you follow on a regular basis: When you’re getting ready for work, you brush your teeth, go for a 20-minute walk, then take a shower. Before giving a big presentation in the office, you might repeat a mantra to mentally prepare. And at the end of a long workweek, you gather with your spouse and kids to enjoy pizza and a movie on Friday nights.
These routines are actually rituals—and though we may not think much about them, they can play a meaningful role in our personal and professional lives, says Harvard Business School Professor Michael Norton.
“Social scientists have traditionally approached rituals from a cultural or religious perspective, but we all have our own idiosyncratic rituals we conduct throughout our days,” says Norton, author of the new book The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions.
“We use them to change our emotional states in many different ways.”
With a 2023 Gallup survey showing that US employees are less satisfied with their jobs and less likely to feel that someone at work cares about them than four years ago, Norton says workplace rituals can be important. Teams with simple rituals, like carving out time for coffee with colleagues once a week or kicking off team meetings by sharing weekend plans before jumping into work talk, report finding more meaning in their work, he says.
After all, Norton says, rituals are powerful: “We use them to change our emotional states in many different ways,” he says, “to calm ourselves down, to amp ourselves up, and to connect with others.”
Why rituals differ from habits
Norton, the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, first began thinking about the role of rituals in his own life after the birth of his daughter more than a decade ago. He quickly became conscious of the high-wire act of books, music, and snuggles as he and his wife attempted to soothe their child to sleep each night.
As the coauthor of a previous book about the link between our spending habits and emotional well-being, Norton knew that spending small amounts of money in certain ways could significantly improve someone’s happiness—but what benefits might come from the small routines we create for ourselves and others to relax, focus, or infuse energy?
To find out, Norton and his colleagues surveyed tens of thousands of people, conducted several experiments, and even performed brain scans. Norton makes an important distinction between a habit and a ritual; we may do both routinely, even unconsciously, but we ascribe more meaning to the latter. As a simple test, Norton asks people whether they brush their teeth or take a shower first in the morning—and if it would feel weird to switch the order. If the order doesn’t matter, it’s likely a habit, but if you can’t conceive of doing the activities the opposite way, you’ve probably turned that habit into a ritual.
In addition to personal rituals, Norton discovered that whether we discuss them or not, rituals are ubiquitous in all kinds of social occasions, from celebrating birthdays to paying respects to the dead. Couples often have rituals too—from setting the dinner table together every night to going grocery shopping every Saturday—and these activities often create a feeling of togetherness.
Rituals and emotions
People turn to rituals to cope with grief, boost enjoyment of a special occasion, or reduce anxiety, Norton says. Pianist Svaitoslav Richter always carried a pink plastic lobster in a little case with him before stepping on stage. The simple ritual helped him focus—and in fact, he felt he couldn’t perform without it.
“His charmed crustacean was as important as his finely tuned piano,” Norton writes. Similarly, Norton recounts in the book the example of an emergency room nurse who, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, often destressed at the end of the day by taking a long shower, imagining work anxiety swirling down the drain with the suds.
Interestingly, studies show that when anxiety creeps in, it’s not effective to tell yourself or others to calm down. Doing so often creates more anxiety because people feel like they’ve failed when they can’t relax. However, researchers have suggested that a familiar pattern can help to stop our anxiety from spinning out of control, Norton says.
Using rituals to bring colleagues together
In one experiment, Norton and colleagues brought a group of strangers into the lab and challenged them to come up with as many uses as possible for a six-sided die. Before the task, each group performed a ritual involving patting their shoulders and stomping their feet. Some groups performed the tasks facing one another, creating a collective ritual, while others performed the activities facing away from one another, creating a more individual ritual. Afterward, the researchers interviewed participants and found that the simple act of performing a ritual together made participants feel like the brainstorming task was more meaningful.
Some businesses have incorporated rituals to help workers build stronger bonds. IDEO, for example, has asked employees to meet for a weekly tea time as a way to encourage workers to collaborate, connect, and deepen relationships. And Walmart founder Sam Walton started leading workers in morning chants to spell out the name of the retailer after visiting a tennis ball factory in Korea where the workers did a company cheer and calisthenics together every morning.
“My feeling is that just because we work so hard, we don’t have to go around with long faces all the time,” Walton is quoted as saying on a company website. “It’s sort of a ‘whistle while you work’ philosophy, and we not only have a heck of a good time with it, we work better because of it.”
Other companies have adopted more intense rituals, organizing treks into the wilderness, paintball competitions, corporate retreats, and group singalongs.
Even if rituals at work feel weird, should we do them anyway?
Bringing rituals into the workplace may feel awkward, Norton says—especially when employees balk at the “trust falls” and other “teambuilding exercises” that managers impose upon them. But the truth is, research shows that such practices improve performance.
“We use these structures to encourage people to interact and bond, and compared to nothing, they do seem to work,” Norton says—even when people don’t enjoy them. “People will tell you they all hated it, but at least they hated it together.”
“The emotions that people can access with rituals are powerful.”
Rather than imposing rituals on employees, however, Norton suggests managers take the lead from team members and have them create their own ritual. “I wouldn’t announce via PowerPoint that we are going to do six claps followed by three shouts at every meeting,” Norton says. “That tends to elicit eye rolls. But when it’s a bottom-up activity they are creating themselves, that’s a better place to start.”
A workplace ritual may be as simple as always eating lunch together on a certain day or always concluding meetings by calling out a positive accomplishment by a member of the team. When these experiences become ingrained, they can become imbued with meaning, Norton says: “The emotions that people can access with rituals are powerful.”
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Image: Image created with elements generated by Midjourney, an artificial intelligence tool, and from AdobeStock/xamtiw
