Your rituals are your culture
Whenever I’ve asked design teams the question “how do you design your team’s culture?” — I’ll often get similar initial responses.
It might be about team events and perks.
The happy hours, the cooking classes, the conferences. The escape room in Brooklyn that was a hit. Yoga classes and wellness wednesdays.
It might about the elegantly written company manifestos.
“Move fast and break things.”
“The work, the work, the work.”
The meticulously crafted objectives and rallying statements that were created at a team off-site and cascaded through each department and into quarterly business reviews and perpetuated into posters and laptop stickers and colorful email signatures.
However, I like to think of culture as something that reflects how you actually operate and work day to day, your practices, and how you assign the meaning and intention behind them.
Every design team has its rituals. How you onboard new hires. Design and work reviews. How you create and implement new processes. How managers share feedback with individuals. Each of these things is framed up in a certain way, and while the function is clear, usually the intention and meaning is subconscious.
“Rituals create a constant nudging so that, over time, a culture learns to do something naturally and intuitively.” — Tim Brown
Design Reviews
How we setup design reviews shows how we interact with one another to resolve tensions. That tension can be a shared design problem, or it could be tensions between people’s ideas. As leaders, it’s an ongoing exercise in teaching your team what we should expect from one another and what to give back in return. It provides meaning towards how your organization values things like respect for ideas that you don’t agree with, the art of listening, honesty and candor, respect for people’s time, and resolving conflict.
Giving Feedback
Wether it’s design feedback or just individual coaching — the most powerful teams are the ones in which leaders understand that the role of feedback is not to prescribe a specific result, but to create a scenario for the best possible outcome to come to life.
Working in a creative industry, we put ideas and concepts out for judgement by people every day. We’re exposed and vulnerable. How we give feedback can mean the difference between the demotivation or the inspiration of a team.
A simple ritual — ask the presenting team what ideas or options they like the best, or what insight they gained from the design exercise. It lets designers step back from the burdens of the brief and the business constraints, and talk freely about what they got most excited about. It effectively releases the tension valve of a design review.
Onboarding as a point of inflection
This is an important part of the employee experience, and how you onboard new team members highlights your company or teams’ shared values, objectives and expectations. It’s a unique moment where you have to ask, at a specific moment in time — What are our goals right now? What is important for this person to know? What is the most important context for them to be successful?
The answers to those questions often change every six months (or less), and so it’s a huge opportunity for teams to ritualize how onboarding is done — it creates a unique inflection point for teams.
At BASIC, we create a moment for design, production, and operational leads to review the standardized onboarding plan for new team members and make adjustments based on the context of the business and where we’re currently focusing on. It helps us reflect and share not just with the new person, but with each other.
Celebrating Wins
Every Monday morning, we start the week with shoutouts. We have an automated form that anyone can fill out whenever they want to give someone props for a job well done. Sometimes it’s for killing it in a presentation. Or to thank someone for the extra hustle on a project. They’re always heartfelt and sincere. We encourage everyone to use it, especially managers, to give props to employees and peers. And we read these out every Monday morning.
It sets the tone for the week, but most importantly, reinforces a culture of recognizing the little things.
Showing how a department hit their OKRs or a that you exceeded quarterly sales goals are all great and necessary. However, people need to know their contributions matter, and it’s usually hard to see that in charts and graphs.
“Not only is seeing believing, doing is believing.” — Barbara Myerhoff
Make rituals part of your process. Let them evolve and grow into something new. Let them be more than just habits, but things that propel your team into continued action and progress.
