What’s your favourite team ritual? Join the discussion and get a badge! ✨

[Angelie Stephens]

Rituals are the regular habits, traditions, and processes that teams follow - and they’re often fundamental for building a successful team.

Editor in Chief of The Economist and Team ‘24 speaker Zanny Minton Beddoes described one of her team’s rituals in our Work Life Blog. Each Monday morning, The Economist’s editorial team meets for a pitch session, where anyone can pitch any idea, and have that idea questioned and debated by the rest of the team. Zanny suggests that by interrogating the ideas during the pitching session, ideas are made much stronger!

In the Atlassian Online Community team, we’ve recently started introducing icebreaker questions to kick off our weekly team meetings. Each week on the day before our meeting, I select a question and post it in our team group chat. This way, everyone can have a think about their answer before the meeting and arrive ready to share! With icebreakers, we get to start off our meeting with a bit of fun, and build connections between our team along the way.

So we’d love to hear - do you have a favourite ritual you do with your team? Do your team meetings follow a particular pattern? Or maybe you have regular check-ins asynchronously? Let us know in the comments!

Plus, get our brand new Work Life kudos badge when you join the discussion! Be sure to join the group before adding your comment here to ensure that you receive your badge!

PS: You can check out what else Zanny had to say here.

[Abby Frelich]

My team is project based, so we don't often work together as a group. We get together quarterly for virtual lunch and icebreaker games. It's a nice way to get to know each other personally and take a break from talking about work! 

[Angelie Stephens]

A virtual lunch sounds so lovely! 😊

[Heydi Menéndez]

Hola @Angelie Stephens  !!

Nuestro ritual favorito en el equipo es hacer puestas a punto de los proyectos en los que trabajamos compartiendo un café luego de almorzar, en la oficina tenemos una maquina de café donde nos juntamos alrededor de una pequeña mesita y de forma informal y distendida hablamos sobre el estado de los proyectos en curso e intercambiams ideas sobre mejoras para las actividades y resultados. Es algo que nos une y nos mantiene al tanto del trabajo de nuestros compañeros permientiéndonos además ser parte de los procesos de otros equipos . Es una manera simplificada de gestionar el progreso de las tareas y resulta agradable de compartir por todos los aportes de la charla y el café.

2.15.1.0

[Angelie Stephens]

Hi Heydi, hope English is okay! I loved reading about your team's coffee chats, sounds like a great way to work on project details ☕️

[PJ Zaiac]

Cheating just a little bit because I have the honor of being on the same team as you, Angelie! And as Angelie will know but the larger Community might not - our team runs a weekly ice-breaker before diving into our routine meetings! 

I love getting to know each of my teammates as humans first, and it's always heartwarming to find that even as a very distributed team, we always have common ground 💙

[Angelie Stephens]

Happy to hear you're enjoying our team icebreakers!! ✨

[Haunani Nakabara]

At the beginning of our team's monthly meeting, we highlight a teammate.  Ahead of the meeting, the individual answers 5 questions about themselves.  The questions are provided as a quiz for the team to see who knows our teammate the best.  After the quiz is concluded, the highlighted teammate has an opportunity to share more details about their answers so we can get to them even better.

[Angelie Stephens]

I love this get to know you quiz idea, Haunani! I might have to borrow this one 😁

[Amanda Barber]

I love the idea of using a quiz!

[Amanda Barber]

We started Monday Mingle at our Monday standups! Each Monday, we use this handy dandy Slack hack to post a question to our standup channel. We've learned a lot about each other! 

[Angelie Stephens]

Monday Mingle is such a fab name for this ritual! 😆

[Andy Gladstone]

We run our leadership meetings every Wednesday from 11:30AM-1PM. They are pretty prescriptive to ensure that we get the most out of them, and include a few 'rituals'. We always start the meeting by going around the room and listing our PB's for the week. A PB can be a Personal Best or Professional Best - and we encourage one another to bring both to the table. Hearing the PB's helps us connect and know where we are all coming into the week from.

[Angelie Stephens]

So cool that PBs can be either personal or professional, I love it! 😀

[Mithila _Amoeboids Technologies_]

Daily scrum meeting is my favorite ritual we do with the team when we start our day of work. It's just for about 15 minutes but it's fruitful. This meeting is essential for us to sync up and ensure smooth collaboration. Here we discuss what we accomplished the previous day and outline our plans for the current day. This practice keeps everyone informed about each other's tasks and progress thereby creating a cohesive work environment.

By sharing our daily plans, we tend to identify any dependencies or areas where approvals or discussions are needed and need to address some tasks promptly. This ritual enhances our productivity and strengthens our team dynamics.

[Angelie Stephens]

It's so nice that meeting each day is so helpful for your team, Mithila! 🙌

[Tomislav Tobijas]

We recently introduced weekly team meetings, taking place each Wednesday from 3 to 4 PM. As most of us work remotely, we decided to encourage showing up at the office on Wednesday so we actually see each other and maybe even have a drink or 2 after work. Really great initiative from the whole team, as, honestly, most people wouldn't even come to the office at all if it wasn't for that. We don't have any rituals (just yet), but I hope to find some ideas among the comments 😀

[Angelie Stephens]

So nice that your team uses weekly meetings as a reason for in-person time, Tomislav! 😁

[Frankie C_]

Our teams have adopted the idea of a shared, cross-team demo at the end of each sprint. Teams had already been doing a great job of establishing feedback loops with business partners, but some felt there was a gap around awareness into what our internal partner teams were working on each sprint. So every two weeks, we have an internal team demo focused on promoting the work partner teams are delivering, and giving peers an opportunity to share feedback. It has made the quality of the work better, and has also given several team members a platform (and confidence) to speak to their work. It has become one of our program's (and CPO's) favorite rituals :)

[Angelie Stephens]

Sounds like a fantastic way to find out more about what different teams are working on! 🙌

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

For in-person meetings, snacks.

All other meetings, reminding the team to keep it short and sweet, just the facts, daily stand ups are not in-depth status meetings.

[Angelie Stephens]

Snacks might just be my favourite ritual of all 😆🍫

[Barbara Szczesniak]

While waiting for everyone to join a refinement or sprint planning meeting, our scrum master will take a few minutes to discuss if anyone has any announcements or personal celebrations coming up. 

[Angelie Stephens]

A lovely way to start off your team meetings, Barbara! 😊

[Claire Chisholm]

We have a quarterly team meeting where we celebrate each other's achievements with awards, all of which are nominated by peers. It's such a fun way to celebrate each other and be celebrated! 

[Angelie Stephens]

Taking time to celebrate together sounds so nice! 🎊

[Dilara Erecek _Avisi Apps_]

We’ve got this cool recruitment ritual where for the second interview, we invite candidates to our office for a team lunch. It’s all about making them feel relaxed and seeing them in a natural setting. After lunch, we spend most of the afternoon working on a case study together – something they’d be doing if they started the next day.

Once the case study is done, we hang out with drinks and snacks. This gives us a chance to see if they fit in with our team vibe, and we can check if the whole team likes the candidate. It’s not just about their hard skills, of course we’re also looking at their soft skills and whether they’re a cultural fit.

This approach has really helped us build the amazing team we have today. We’re all about finding people who are great at what they do and who also get along well with everyone at Avisi Apps.

[Angelie Stephens]

Wow that's such an interesting recruitment ritual! Thank you for sharing, Dilara! 😊

[Ciara TN]

Hi, loved reading all the rituals, some good ideas to bring in house. 

Ours is an onsite breakfast morning where each of the offices has the same presentation but in a cozy set up with a Swedish breakfast served up. Always time to chat after about it in smaller groups and also to catch up with colleagues.

[Angelie Stephens]

Catching up over a Swedish breakfast sounds fantastic, Ciara! 😄

[Vronik]

Hi

My favorite ritual for both Mondays and Fridays is to meet in a virtual room because the team is relocated and get together for no more than 15 minutes, to connect, talk about general things, without getting into work topics to do a little networking, talk of human things that affect us all and then the last minutes we do decide how to face the week as we have closed it and take stock of things to improve or continue doing for the following week, it brings us closer as people and everyone is very happy with this activity

[Angelie Stephens]

Sounds like a super concise & effective team building session! 🙌

[Georg Mayer]

We as a small consulting company with 5 people, we have one fixed appointment (otherwise we work almost exclusively remotely) : 

One day on site once a month.

For this team day we are always organizing different things, for example games to get to know each other, escape rooms, outdoor action (last time with very interesting disc golf :-) ).

There is also the big monthly retro of this team day. During this retrospective, we want to make sure that everybody is pulling in the same direction and that there are no disruptive obstacles.

[Angelie Stephens]

I'm very intrigued by disc golf 🤔 This monthly catch up sounds great, Georg! 

[Natasa Sebek]

Rant calls ;)

[Juan Carlos Pin]

Hi all!

In a previous team I was in, just before the second part of the day, we used to play "Blind Movies", lots of laugh and fun, so engaging to build trust and start working relaxed and focused.

[Brett Evans]

I like to have 2 key rituals, one is to have some form of non work related item which is usually to stimulate conversation and break the ice. With the team below it was to get a picture of a pet and add it into physical board once a sprint.

The other is to constantly reference back to a shared vision of mission at the start of a meeting or gathering and reference back how this event should help drive towards that vision or mission.

[Summer_Hogan]

My team has a few traditions we use. One is definitely the ice breaker before some of our SAFe ceremonies. Another thing we do on a recurring basis is review our plays that we have done using the Team Playbook and consistently looking for new ones we can do. I find that these plays foster trust amongst team members and get the team talking to each other. Also, for those of you who have never done https://codenames.game/ you should try it with your team. It is so much fun! 

Another is in most of our Community of Practice (COP) meetings we do lean coffee and that also really gets people talking to the point we solve real problems. 

[Angelie Stephens]

Love that you use the Team Playbook @Summer_Hogan ! I'm definitely going to have to check out the Codenames game as well 😁

[Liz Tanner]

I'm a one human band now, but I had an awesome ID Team manager that lead a fully remote L&D team of four I was in. She held a 1-hr weekly team check-in meeting every week, regardless of whether we were working a team project or not.

EOD the day before each meeting, she sent an agenda with the first 5-10 min. set for an icebreaker question. Topics ranged from favorite band, career/skill building/certification courses we were interested in, weirdest pet growing up-everything!

These weekly team touchpoints each Wednesday were very simple by design yet had an overwhelmingly positive impact on our team. By incorporating the weekly, random icebreakers into our agenda, it subtly revealed our personalities behind the professionals, enabled exchanges of career and skill development resources, and established team trust by setting a culture of open, transparent communication.

...and I totally stole this method to create team exercises and rituals with my own teams! :)

[Angelie Stephens]

I'm also a huge fan of random topic icebreaker questions, Liz! 😊 

[John D Patton]

My favorite team ritual is our weekly “Win of the Week” sessions conducted asynchronously on Slack. Every Friday morning, we post a thread in our designated Slack channel where each team member shares one professional accomplishment or personal victory from the past week. This practice allows us to celebrate our collective and individual successes, even if we’re working remotely or in different time zones. It helps boost morale, encourages reflection on our achievements, and promotes a culture of appreciation and recognition. Sharing these wins on Slack also offers insights into each other’s work and lives, strengthening our team bonds and creating a sense of unity. I find it to be an uplifting way to end the week, allowing everyone to head into the weekend with a sense of accomplishment and connection. 

[Angelie Stephens]

This is lovely, John! Such a great way to connect async 😁

[carolyn french]

We have a ritual I like of everyone posting in one Slack channel to say good morning or if you're stepping away to run an errand or have a sick child so may not be 100% there. It makes people feel more connected, and limits 'hello' chatter and availability to this channel, which makes it less distracting too.

[Angelie Stephens]

Having a chatter specific Slack channel is such a great idea, Carolyn! 

[Jovin]

The main routine I love doing with the team is "Homeroom". Once a week we get together virtually online and do non-work related activities - show & tells, quick party games online, or just having some time socialising. They're obviously not mandatory but a great way to connect!

[Angelie Stephens]

Homeroom sounds like a great time, Jovin! 🙌

[Varsha Joshi]

We have a few routines, but the best one is where we hop on a virtual happy hour, talk about things other than work. I find that really refreshing and creates strong team. It's mostly movies, things they have done.

[Angelie Stephens]

Love the idea of a virtual happy hour, Varsha! 🍻☕️🧋