Put yourself in this reality: You are driving to improve outcomes but also managing expenses. The dynamics of your infrastructure, regulatory requirements, governing bodies, stakeholders, and patients or customers are incredibly complex, with multiple strategies needed to redefine business models—in order to both operate effectively in the current market and prepare for the future of your industry with the accelerating tech advancements. You commonly hear things like:
- “There aren’t enough hours in the day.”
- “I spend all my time putting out fires.”
- “I told my leader before and nothing ever happens.”
- “We never have the resources we need.”
Sound familiar? It’s easy to write this off as “the reality of the workplace.” However, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Picture this: A supply runs low. Your front-line team notices, communicates the issue, and by the next shift, the issue has been resolved with either restocked supplies or an established work-around procedure. Every front-line employee feels enabled and expected to create change with every shift, every customer, every transaction, every service.
Does this sound like a dream? Or do you feel frustration because you’ve put in place every tool and process to make that happen, and yet it doesn’t move the needle or the change doesn’t stick?
This is where the power of Ways of Working comes in. The sentiments we heard in the first reality indicate that an organization is ready for a shift. The second scenario indicates the promise of effective ways of working within an organization.
Ways of working are the patterns of behavior we use to get work done. The concept is often confused with the tools and processes we lean on to solve problems, such as a new technology or system, a new process or approach, or changing the team structure. It’s easy to become frustrated when those tools don’t fully resolve an issue. A more accurate look at ways of working adds an emotional and social set of tools to a leader’s toolkit that truly empowers employees.
As we’ve studied and experienced ways of working in action with our clients, TiER1 has seen two common patterns of work emerge that are important to differentiate: routines and rituals.
- Routines: These are repetitive, unconscious patterns of interdependent behaviors between people. These patterns are habitual and help you manage chaos, as well as accomplish and process more during times of calm (e.g., daily standups, email or Slack check-ins, collaboration norms).
- Rituals: These are repetitive, mindful patterns of behavior that are intentional, meaningful, and symbolic. Rituals are meant to energize you and your team and connect each of you to your organization’s higher purpose (e.g., awards and recognition celebrations, organizational traditions). Perhaps daily standups actually started as a ritual.
Here’s the challenge between rituals and routines―rituals will inevitably shift to a routine over time. There’s significant power in interrupting that evolution, but also in consciously deciding what should be a ritual and what should be a habit in the first place.
Let’s take a look at huddles, staff meetings, or [insert recurring time commitment on our calendar]. That block of time was initially put on the calendar to solve a problem, but over time we lose focus and our performance goes into autopilot. When it comes to washing our hands or submitting expense reports, autopilot works great. It’s something that automatically needs to be done but we don’t need to expend extra energy doing it. However, when it comes to things like having the right supplies to effectively treat a patient, we can’t afford to lose our focus. When something becomes unconscious and mindless, it turns into a routine.
How do you interrupt the routine to shift back to ritual?
An effective huddle or meeting could be considered a ritual. As a ritual, in a health system for example, it has the power to change the outcomes for the rest of that shift and ultimately improve outcomes for the patients at the hospital or medical center that day. In an office setting or with a project team, it can create focus or strategic momentum for a team with competing priorities. Regardless of the setting, you can be intentional in deciding what ways of working should be shifted or elevated to rituals.
Here are steps you can take to interrupt the routine and create a ritual:
1. Address the elephants in the room or those things that are too highly regarded to be open to criticism. Is there a personnel issue that isn’t being handled or behaviors tolerated which are against or cultural or performance expectations?
2. Establish a clear purpose and expected outcome of the ritual. Ensure that you are routinely evaluating if those continue to be met. If the purpose is to ensure the best outcomes and remove barriers that hinder that, ensure that those barriers are effectively getting resolved. If the purpose is to accelerate a process, improve engagement, or align the team, look at data to ensure it’s working.
3. Change the order of activities. Starting a meeting or huddle by identifying key issues can create an environment of negativity. Consider reordering and begin by celebrating wins or sharing praise for a team member. Also, be intentional with how you end the session. Perhaps every ritual ends with a round of gratitude; thanking the team for raising up the issues; or by sharing issues that were resolved from previous meetings. Regardless of where you land, periodically reevaluate the order and change it up so that it stays fresh.
4. Continuously build and evolve or iterate as you learn what works for your team.
Now that the purpose and flow of the ritual is established, how do you ensure it drives empowerment and action?
Leveraging a huddle or standing meeting as a ritual is a great way to create the right boundaries and guardrails coupled with the right freedoms that allow employees to solve problems, realize potential, and be empowered to embrace and create change. It also allows for transparency of data from the front line to the C-suite, collaboration, and overall improvement including operating margins, positive outcomes, patient/customer and client experience, employee engagement, and more. Yet, to ensure these are happening, you must tie the ritual and the daily work to meaningful metrics.
Interrupting routines to create rituals is a powerful tool for improving ways of working across the organization. By being clear about the change we seek and providing clarity to how change occurs, team members can see how their actions impact outcomes. This is the power of rituals and is key to activating quality, safety, innovation, and experience strategies through your people. Don’t accept your current reality as routine. Be intentional about your ways of working to bring a new reality to life.
(TiER1 alumni, Nick Pineda, also contributed to this article.)
If you’d like to talk to Jen or another TiER1er to evaluate if your ways of working are supporting your team needs, reach out to us in the form below.
