Okay, job-seeker, you’ve got the job. Congratulations! And you, Manager—you’ve hired the next rockstar cohort. Well done!

After the balloons have deflated, the music video has been viewed, and the empty bowl of candy has been moved from the new person’s desk, everyone defaults to just showing up at work.

Then what?

My goal in writing this book is to help transform “everyday routines” into “workplace magic,” but that doesn’t mean we’ll always be having a blast. While that would be nice, it’s not realistic. Sometimes work is actually, well, work. While we can and absolutely should feel plugged into a greater purpose beyond that looming checklist, we do need to make those calls (Yep! Good ol’ fashioned phone calls), create that spreadsheet, and take our turn tidying up the communal kitchen. So where’s the magic?

One of the ways rituals work best is by creating a container around the most mundane activities, thereby elevating them. Think about a wedding ceremony. There’s nothing inherently commitment-worthy about a ring exchange or a single kiss. But because we grant those actions magical properties, they influence us to try to stay faithful and committed. Wedding traditions abound, from the beginning to the end, bookending the actual business of getting and staying married “till death do us part” (which the betrothed among us know is no piece of cake) with rituals.

This is how I think about rituals at work, too. There’s the requisite business of being in business, and then there are the rituals that help us power up and through the day—the work of work. So for this next stop on our roadmap, we’re shining a light on beginnings and endings.

Leadership and management writer Gwen Moran writes in a Fast Company article, “Rituals signal to us that it’s time for a specific mindset or activity. They act as triggers to more effortlessly get us ready for what we need to do.”¹ Rituals are great preparation, and they can help us wrap things up, too. After all, the end of one thing is the beginning of another. These days, with our jobs chasing after us, pinging from our pockets at all hours of every day if we let them, taking time off is a mindset that needs our attention more than ever. Put another way: If we don’t take charge of our schedules, our devices will happily do it for us. We can harness rituals at the beginning and end of everything we do, and we can ensure we include our technology, leveraging what we love about it, while also putting it in its place.

As you read through these rather clever ideas, think about how you begin—perhaps a day, a week, a meeting, or a project—and for whom. Perhaps just yourself, your team, or your company. I’ll share great beginning rituals here, and some of my favorite closing rituals at the end of the book. Whether we do the same thing at the beginning and the end of an activity, akin to the “Om” chanted at the beginning and end of a yoga class, or something different, like how we begin standing at attention at a baseball game with the “Star-Spangled Banner” and end with the seventh-inning stretch, one thing is for sure: beginnings and endings are prime ritual real estate.

Opening Ceremonies

Perhaps the most illustrious of all opening ceremonies is the incredible pomp and circumstance of the Olympics, some of which dates all the way back to the ancient Greek games. Today, the official commencement of the most comprehensive international gathering on earth takes place with the parade of nations. Athletes from around the world march in alphabetical order according to the host’s language, including the number of strokes in Chinese translations. This is just one of many ways the Olympics make an effort to include the value of diversity into the rituals.

And then, of course, there’s the torch-runner, perhaps one of the most well-known rituals on earth.

As we know, the summer Olympics of 2020 were postponed due to COVID-19. So what’s an Olympics fan to do? One of my favorite rituals while we were quarantined was to watch the women’s Olympic gymnastics team and individual all-around finals with my daughters starting with the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. We do what we can, right? And rituals help us ease the pain.

For most of us who report to an office, our opening ceremonies kind of naturally evolve—we walk out of the elevator into the office, grabbing a coffee along the way. For those who work from home, it’s helpful to think about how to create personal opening ceremonies to help start the day and delineate home from work.

Not an easy task! But rituals can really help us create the transitions that have never mattered more.

For years companies have been abandoning traditional offices, sometimes for coworking spaces, and other times for at least partly remote arrangements. In 2018, “flexible workspaces accounted for more than two-thirds of the U.S. office market occupancy gains,” and “by 2030, the flexible workspace market is expected to represent 30 percent of U.S. office stock.”² According to an OWL Lab survey on remote workers, 62 percent work remotely (30 percent being completely full time), compared to the 38 percent of employees that work solely on-site.³

Wow!

Does this mean that unless you have to punch a time clock or show up in an office, work never really begins and never really ends? No, not at all. In fact, I would argue that because so many more of us are expected to be our own DIY supervisor, appreciation for beginnings and endings matters, a lot. Regardless of where you sit or what time it is, rituals are the perfect way to light the torch on your own Olympics, signaling to yourself and others that work has begun.

Monday, a Beautiful Thing?

Whether you work at work, at home, or what many called the Third Space, Starbucks or another public space, Monday is Monday, and for many people, it’s the official beginning of the workweek. One of my personal rituals for years has been to take an hour on Sunday night to organize my thoughts, identify work and family priorities, and even check a few things off my list so I can hit the ground running on Monday.

Sara Blakely is famous for a couple things. She came up with the idea for Spanx, the shapewear sensation. And in 2012 she became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.⁴ I’m willing to bet that her personal rituals play a role in her success.

One awesome Sara Blakely ritual is that Mondays are her “think day.” She keeps them unstructured, with no meetings so she can begin the week with some space. But don’t let that lead you to believe that the rest of her week is back-to-back without any time or space to think. Blakely actually begins every day with one of my favorite rituals—ever! As she told Reid Hoffman on his awesome podcast, Masters of Scale, “I live really close to Spanx, so I’ve created what my friends call my ‘fake commute,’ and I get up an hour early before I’m supposed to go to Spanx, and I drive around aimlessly in Atlanta with my commute so that I can have my thoughts come to me.”⁵

Don’t you love thinking of this powerhouse CEO driving around the Atlanta suburbs just thinking?

While spending all these hours by herself, dreaming up the next big thing, may seem like a waste of time, the numbers speak for themselves—Spanx has grown to an estimated $400 million in sales.⁶

Indulgence never looked so productive.

Another CEO that has taken to Monday indulgences is Jodi Kovitz, the founder and CEO of #movethedial, a company devoted to changing the story of women in tech. Today Kovitz has 22 employees, and she begins each Monday with a ritual that she started when she had only two.

At 9:30 a.m. on Monday mornings, her team comes together for what Kovitz calls a “grounding ritual,” in order to “connect on a human level, and to invest in the culture and connectivity of the team.”

Each person shares three things: (1) something they’re grateful for, personal or professional, (2) something they’re proud of, and (3) something that they’re struggling with.

The ritual began as just part of the meeting, which would then transition to business updates, but people were so into the Monday morning ritual that Kovitz moved the status updates to their own meeting on Thursday.

Wouldn’t it make more business sense to launch the week with projects and bottom-line projections? Well, in case you haven’t heard, the soft stuff is the new hard stuff. And for Kovitz, “It’s more important for people to feel glued together, connected, grounded, valued—like they have a reason to be there. And to ease into Monday is really a beautiful thing.”⁷

Google’s Project Aristotle was an extensive study of 180+ teams over two years to find out what makes teams great. They found that teams that feel psychologically safe (the first and most important of five attributes that make up a great team) are rated effective twice as much by their leaders. Not only that, but these teams bring in more revenue, demonstrate more innovation, and have better retention.⁸ And as Promise54, a nonprofit talent solutions provider, reminds us, “Psychological safety is critical to DEI work [diversity, equity, and inclusion] because it supports and enables vulnerability, learning, growth, and behavior change.”⁹

Psychological safety really moves the dial on performance.

Monk Mode Mornings

Rituals are a great way to begin the week with intention. The same, though, goes for the beginning of any given day. Georgetown computer science professor and technology and culture expert, Cal Newport, in his book Deep Work, writes, “I’m starting to see more entrepreneurs . . . especially CEOs of small startups—doing what I call Monk Mode Morning, where they say, ‘As far as anyone is concerned I’m reachable starting at 11 a.m. or noon, and I am never available for meetings, I’m never going to answer an email and never going to answer the phone before then.”¹⁰ Holding off on connecting with others helps us connect to ourselves first.

In his blog post about the topic, Newport underscores the reason Monk Mode Mornings work so well: “What makes this hack particularly effective is its simple regularity. If someone wants to schedule something with you, it becomes reflexive to respond ‘anytime after noon.’ Similarly, your colleagues soon learn not to expect you to see something they send until after lunch.”¹¹ Did you catch that? The magic is in the ritual of it. Monk Mode Morning is a personal working ritual that first honors your relationship with yourself by prioritizing your deep, focused work. Then by proxy it’s a ritual that helps your colleagues honor their working relationship with you by respecting your intentional boundaries. Win-win.

Top leaders are known for being disciplined, often including some variation of Monk Mode Morning behavior. Ron Ben-Zeev, founder and CEO of World Housing Solution, a provider of structures for the armed forces, prefers to be the first one to arrive at his office. “Coming in before anyone else is in the office makes me more productive. I’ve found that for me, working one hour alone is equal to two hours in the office with people because there are no distractions and no one pulling you.”¹² Anyone with kids knows how important it is to be the first one up in order to get anything accomplished. There’s nothing better than a quiet morning, an early-riser ritual, to collect one’s thoughts.

Take a guess how Rich Pierson, cofounder of the meditation app Headspace, starts his day. Sure enough, he always start his day with 60 minutes of meditation. “I have done this consistently for almost nine years now, and it’s the foundation for everything I do,” he admits.¹³ Since its founding in 2010, Headspace has been downloaded 62 million times in 190 countries and boasts more than 2 million paid subscribers.¹⁴ Whether it’s the ritual or just the meditating, it sure looks like something’s working!

If meditating isn’t your jam, you could try what Lara Little, founder and CEO of Lusomé, a luxury sleepwear company, does. “I carve out 30 minutes every morning to sit quietly with a cup of hot lemon water and set my intention for the day. No iPhone or email either—just my thoughts, a pen and my favorite Muji journal. I’ve also stopped trying to cram in 25 daily tasks and instead focus on three meaningful goals that can be related to business, family, health, or social good. It’s so gratifying to cross them off my list and gives me a small sense of accomplishment every single day.”¹⁵

Or you can do what Sara Blakely does and factor some “me time” into your commute. As Blakely told Hoffman, “I’ve identified where my best thinking happens, and it’s in the car,” and I think that is true for many of us—that solo, unstructured time like when we’re in the shower. Sometimes we just need to make sure that these spaces stay private. Ritualizing these in-between spaces keeps them sacred.

The key with these individual rituals is to find what works for you. Find out when your brain is at its peak creativity, and carve out that time to sit with yourself and focus on your work. The term meditation often is associated with sitting quietly, legs crossed, with your mind completely shut off. But that’s not what meditation is. Meditation as an individual ritual is about connecting to yourself and understanding what you need to do your best work. This can be as simple as spending a few hours of the day focusing on your own work, collecting your thoughts in a journal, or listening to music on your daily commute.

Virtual Beginnings

It’s hard to imagine the Olympics opening over Zoom, but remote companies have been doing it like this forever, and they have a lot to teach us.

Dribbble is an online community for designers to connect with each other and for those seeking design services. I had a blast chatting with CEO Zack Onisko, especially about rituals that help his entire remote workforce feel connected.

Onisko explained, “We don’t really have very strict working hours. We try to leverage their remote work lifestyle to allow people to be able to build their perfect day and kind of come online and leave as they need to.” This could lead to a pretty chaotic beginning of the workday, particularly given different time zones. Instead, a simple, oddly organic ritual has grown at Dribbble to keep employees feeling linked to one another. At the beginning and end of the workday, people simply log onto the company Slack channel and say hi, waving to their colleagues with an emoji. Some people even invite their remote colleagues into a more intimate Zoom room to drink coffee
together.

In addition, on Fridays, the morning ritual gets powered up. Instead of just a little wave, people share a photo of themselves in the moment or from the past, sometimes in work attire and, well, sometimes wearing a prom dress! Do you remember the one question that I always asked during my research to identify great company rituals? When I asked Nicole Warshauer, director of branding communications, this question—What is it at Dribbble that makes you feel most like a Dribbble-employee or most “Dribbble-ish”?—she didn’t miss a beat, “Friday mornings are the most Dribbble-ish for me.”

With connecting wave-and-photo-rituals like these, it’s not hard to see why Inc. magazine identified Dribbble as “one of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in America in 2020.”¹⁶

Whether your opening ceremony has always been stopping at Starbucks every morning (like me), meditating, sharing with your team, or turning on your computer and waving, beginnings matter, so think about how you can work with your employees to make them meaningful. Opening ceremony rituals aren’t just important for your employees to feel connected, they can also impact your customers by inviting them into your world.

A Customer Walks into a Store

Rituals is a Dutch-based home and cosmetics company that operates in 31 countries and counting. As of May 2019, there were 730 stores around the world, and Rituals was opening 2.5 stores a week (120 a year) when most retailers have been closing stores left and right. Marjolein Westerbeek, the president of Rituals USA, shared with me that they, in fact, “don’t consider themselves a retailer.” Rather, their very purpose is to be in the business of creating rituals—hence, the name. They’re on a mission to transform everyday routines into rituals
magic.

When you walk into a Rituals store anywhere in the world, you’re first offered a cup of tea. Receiving tea and not a sales pitch is something the company does intentionally, and something that certainly made me feel connected when I walked into the store. Secondly, each customer is offered a “meaningful moment.” It could be a one-minute meditation. It could be a hand massage. There are a number of different ways that the employees strive to create opportunities to pause. It’s only after those two things have happened that employees even start thinking and talking about the products. They view the products as a catalyst to create more meaningful moments, aka, purpose.

Westerbeek reflected on why she’s so patient, so willing to press pause before the pitch. “The mission has always been the same, but bringing meaningful moments and rituals to people and telling their stories takes time.”

These rituals are worth the wait.

Laura Mignott is the founder and CEO of DFlash, an event-planning company in New York City. Mignott, like Westerbeek, understands from personal experience how important it is to bring people in thoughtfully and to promote feelings of safety and belonging from the very beginning. She told me, “This might happen more to me being a black woman in business, where a lot of times I don’t feel welcome. It could be I’m being followed around Barney’s, or people will just be ignoring me at a store. It’s ridiculous . . . and often at events. It happens all the time, still.”

How does she combat this potential unwelcome feeling, professionally and for people attending her events? And how does she create the opposite experience, one where people feel like they belong? Some of the simplest rituals are the most powerful. She makes it her business (literally) to stand at the front door of the events and say, “Welcome home.” Sometimes people ask her if she lives there, at the event space, to which she responds, “‘Yes! It’s my house!’ It’s an amuse-bouche, like a palate cleanser. People smile.”

Still not sure that something so simple and homespun can actually make a difference? In support, Mignott responded, “The proof is in the pudding. When we worked with Samsung for about five to six years, we transformed their experience at SXSW . . . to where they were the coolest thing at South-by. Not by investing a ton of money, but by changing how people perceive the ritual of going into the experience for Samsung.”

The DFlash website summarizes, “Our motto is simple: Welcome Home—every experience we create should feel welcoming when you walk thru the door & should feel like home, so that you’ll want to stay.”¹⁷

For Mignott, helping people feel safe and welcome is her purpose. Sometimes it’s something as simple as a hello that stops someone in their tracks. Their motto is simple, and it works.

March Through the Arch—and Then Do It Again: Bookending Rituals

If a ritual works well once, why not do it again? I like the concept of bookending rituals around important events. Applying a ceremony to an ending can be incredibly powerful. The Olympics, for example, always ends with just as much pomp and circumstance as in the beginning. The parade of flags, the host country’s national anthem—many of the opening rituals return to close the circle.

When Morty Schapiro made the move from the president of Williams College to Northwestern University in the summer of 2009, one of his very first meetings was with the office of Student Affairs. Schapiro asked, “What are our long-standing traditions?” The response he heard underwhelmed: “What traditions?”

While Northwestern is a newer school, less steeped in age-old traditions than Williams College and other East Coast institutions, Schapiro felt it was important to identify and amplify existing Northwestern rituals and create new ones.

Schapiro soon uncovered a few. Painting the Rock is one where students from various campus groups have been painting a rock with lines like “Pledge Kappa” or “Come to Club Lacrosse” since 1957. Dillo Day, an all-day rock festival on the water every May on the Saturday before exams is another. But Schapiro soon realized that Northwestern didn’t have a ritual to welcome incoming students. We all know how important onboarding is, so he went back to Student Affairs and asked for help. A colleague suggested, “Let’s walk the kids through the arch that’s on campus.” A ritual was born.

Schapiro and his team rushed to quickly organize a march through the arch in September 2009. They didn’t bother getting permission from the city that first year, which turned out not to be a problem, since only about 20 kids participated, and they just dodged the cars to march through the arch.

By year three, every single incoming student—over 2,000 kids—marched through the arch. Today, it’s a ritual not to be missed. The marching band leads the students through Weber Arch, so named by Schapiro for his predecessor and the fourteenth president of the university, Arnie Weber.¹⁸

Rituals do well when steeped in tradition.

These days parents, told in advance where to find their kids in the sea of purple, line the streets and take pictures. The kids feel like they are part of something special as they walk through the arch like all those who came before them and begin to come together as their own class. When I visited Northwestern, students told me that the march makes them feel more connected to their classmates and the university. I’m sure the same goes for the parents who are kvelling from the sidelines.

Recently, Northwestern added the back end of this ritual, welcoming its graduating students back through the arch during graduation week for a full-circle journey. In 2018 only about a third of the class (or 700 kids) actually walked back through the arch, but it’s a work in progress moving in the right direction—bookending one of life’s most important times.

And here’s the kicker: Even though the march through the arch is a relatively recent ritual, the students don’t see it this way. Schapiro once asked a student, “What is your proudest moment so far at Northwestern?” The student’s response: “My best moment that brought me to tears was March through the Arch because to be part of such a grand old tradition really touched my soul.”

As Schapiro told me with a twinkle in his eye, “I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was only the third year.”