Ask HN: Hybrid/Remote software team rituals

So... Your ritual is no rituals?

> Previously we tried more traditional stuff like fire walking but we had to stop doing that one because a guy in another team wasn't careful setting up the coal and then HR banned it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

tbh I found fire walking to be overrated. Onboarding is really difficult and, as a consequence, the Kanban board just doesn't paint a full picture for new staff during their first weeks. And the ritual has to happen late at night so every once in a while someone starts bickering about having to stay late at work and demands to be paid for extra hours. It's far more trouble than it's worth, I don't think it has any significant advantage over sacrificing a goat on spring equinox, which you only have to do once.

1:1s.

WIPs.

Asynchronous comms.

That’s it. For people who want to, they develop a closer relationship and catch up more often. But it’s not expected.

We trust our people, and expectations have been set and agreed upon. It’s enough.

> rituals have been helpful for your software development teams

An interesting choice of word worth exploring. One could have said "activity" or "procedure", but ritual carries some connotations about the state of remote/hybrid working.

What I think you're asking is - what ways we can connect/bond in human ways? Group dynamics, team identity, loyalty, non-monetary reward, focus and satisfaction, and much more, are determined by the interpersonal bonds that obviously have been disintegrating in a post-pandemic workforce.

Great that people want to find ways to preserve that.

Rituals can be healthy, but also toxic. If an organisation already has a strong charter they can be used to keep it on track. But they can be used to select and filter group membership, and if anyone (the super-sociable one) gets to define and enforce rituals they become a mechanism for one group to take over the company and impose their values by fiat.

For example, food in the workplace is contentious. I consulted at a medium sized London startup where there was a daily banquet of obscenely healthy vegetarian food. At the order of the MD's wife, lunch attendance was "required", lest you fall our of favour with "the family" (which is how she cringingly referred to the company workers). She would sit and watch everybody with eagle eyes. Having a controlling "feeder" policing the staff this way felt toxic.

In many big London firms, "pints with the lads" on Friday is a City ritual that weeds out the family-men and those who can't navigate the social status intricacies of "buying the boss a beer". Going to a bar with 18 year old lap-dancers gets old when you want be at home and talk to your wife, or 18 yo daughter about her A-level homework. In some Japanese work culture, drinking till you can't stand up is a symbol of workplace vigour and loyalty. Although in healthy companies the women come out for drinks too, these rituals are often ways to cement male domination.

To quote Nietzsche "What new rituals must you invent to atone..." As rituals transform into electronic versions there is no doubt that new controlling behaviours will emerge, making performative rituals of loyalty, denouncement, compliance and symbolic belonging. There are already new ways of including or excluding people via technological means just along the lines of "Teams or Zoom" [1]

Meetings can also just be meetings. But really they are more. "Rituals", if they are to be healthy, need to be optional, evolve organically, and do so in a way that is inclusive of the whole team.

[1] Other much better teleconferencing solutions are available.

"Ritual", as well as "ceremony" as it's prescribed by some team methodologies, are both attempts to submit the team individual into a supposed greater order, where there's none.

You may speak of ritual or ceremony when something has been instituted for generations or at least several years, for significant effects towards the group itself (not towards its output).

When the form and content of your practices change every 6 months, and vary widly because the things you work on, or because the hierarchy mandates you to, or because the group/team itself changes, that's nothing that's been instituted.

A business company may very well have its own set of practices. But trying to tweak vocabulary towards making them sound like they are of the same level of importance and impact as rituals or ceremonies, with what those words mean in the social and religious senses, is really an attempt at manipulation.