Team Rites

rite: A prescribed behavior / behavior: Human conduct relative to social norms [Wikipedia]

NB: Ritual is a more common word than rite in English, but my understanding is that a ritual is definitely religious in nature, whereas a rite can be social.

How do you create a team spirit when you don't see each other very often and most of the work is done remotely?

Generally, the manager receives objectives at the beginning of the year and passes them on to his or her staff. As everyone is working towards the same objectives (or at least common company objectives), one might think that this is enough to create a team. But is it ? This is a real challenge when remote working becomes the norm, particularly when the assigned objectives and evaluations are, in most cases, individual: There is a real risk that the manager will find himself managing several one-person teams rather than one multi-person team. Especially when the positions can be heterogeneous and specialised, in small organisations.

Large human institutions (religious, military, etc.) have always had important rites. Is it the rite that creates the social group or the social group that creates its own rites? We won't have the space to answer this question in a LinkedIn article! In any case, as a manager, having "team rites" certainly helps to create that team spirit that is so necessary for people to feel good about their work and to function as an effective group. After all, one of the manager's goals is that the work done by the team is greater than what would be achieved by the sum of work of its individual collaborators.

The essence of a rite is that it must be regular and that the whole team must participate in it. Rites can be social (the Friday night pub in the UK, for example) or operational. In the past, I tried to set up a social rite for my team in Scotland: Eating out once a week, for less than a tenner, no talking shop, and trying to change restaurant every week. It didn't work very well, because it impacted on people's personal time, for whom lunch is not as important a part of the day as it is in France (they might prefer to go shopping for example). Not everyone is Joel Spolsky !

Operational rites are easier to set up: weekly team meeting, monthly forecast meeting, and annual brainstorming workshop, in my experience. The important thing is to respect them. I think in the last 10 years, I've moved the team meeting around a lot, so that everyone could attend, but I've almost NEVER cancelled it. For me, it was important that all the team members should talk to each other once a week if possible (It didn't matter if the meeting sometimes slipped from Monday to Wednesday as a result). Otherwise, it would still have been an "operational" meeting, but it would no longer have been a rite, and it would have ceased to contribute to the existence of the team spirit.

Some methodologies have very important recurring rites, like the Agile methodology with its prescribed meetings: Sprint planning, Daily standup, Sprint review, Sprint retrospective. They take quite some time and often clash with the regular schedule that the team may have had before the switch to Agile. There is a risk that the functional teams (development, testing, etc.) will explode, completely replaced by the "Agile teams". Yet the employees of the Agile teams still exist as functional teams in the org chart, and are still under the responsibility of a functional manager, who has to take care of their career and evaluate them at the end of the year (while his visibility on their individual contribution has disappeared ! I think this problem deserves a future article by itself 😉 ).

Experience shows that the most successful Agile teams, the ones with the best cohesion and their own "team spirit", are often those who respect the most important rites of this methodology, in particular the Sprint Retro.

And you, do you have team rites? Do you think they contribute to the cohesion of your team and to the creation of a team spirit? Please share your experience in the comments.

Talk to you soon,

Thomas