I wasn't there when Nature started, so most of our rituals were running long before I joined and no one remembers who started them all, which is the point. A ritual that's worth keeping outlives the person who started it, and it should still make sense to someone who joined years after the fact.
You don't notice your rituals until someone new joins and you find yourself trying to explain them out loud. Every workplace has them, some deliberate and some that just happened, and over time they quietly become the stuff that makes you, you. You're too close to see how much work they're doing until you have to describe your own workplace to someone who wasn't there for any of it.
That matters more, not less, when a business is growing fast. Most companies respond to growing pains with more process, more layers and more sign-off, whereas we went the other way and leaned harder into the things that don't change.
Every new joiner gets a buddy outside of their core team, but that's really just the starting point, because what happens next is people from all over the business make time for them, over coffee and in formal onboarding sessions, again and again, for every single person who joins. Ask any new starter what stood out and it's rarely the induction deck. It's that people they'd never worked with went out of their way to make them feel welcome, and that's the ritual doing the work of turning a stranger into someone who belongs here.
Or take Town Hall, our weekly whole-company meeting, where business updates get shared alongside everything else: social events, mistakes owned out loud as 'oops monkeys', shout-outs across teams, and anyone who wants to grab the mic. We've run it every week for over a decade, through a pandemic and through the business changing shape more than once, and we never cancel it, even heading into our busiest stretches of the year when it would be the easiest thing in the world to skip for 'just this week'. That's exactly when people need the anchor the most, because busy is when things feel most likely to fall apart, so that's when the ritual has to hold.
That's the test, honestly. Anyone can keep a ritual going when things are calm, and what matters is whether it survives the week you're most tempted to drop it.
Underneath everything else, that's really what rituals are doing: they reduce ambiguity. When you don't know what's going to happen this week, or who to ask, or whether it's safe to put your hand up, a ritual answers that without anyone having to explain it. Nobody needs to tell you Town Hall matters, because it's Tuesday and it's happening, like it always does.
We've built rituals into all corners of the business, in L&D, in teams, in how we mark promotions and celebrations, and there's a rhythm to how we connect week to week that has nothing to do with a calendar invite. None of them are complicated on their own. What they have in common is that they're not a one-off decision, they get baked in and then baked in again, week after week, until nobody remembers a time they weren't there.
Because that's the part nobody tells you about rituals: having them isn't the hard bit, anyone can start one. The hard bit is what keeps them going after the novelty's gone, when it would cost nothing to let one slide just this once, and it isn't anyone deciding to do it each time. It's just what we do. The moment a ritual stops getting reinforced, it's not a ritual anymore, it's a memory of one.
I'd bet every workplace has a few of these hiding in plain sight, doing more work than anyone gives them credit for. The real question isn't whether you've got them, it's whether you know they're yours to protect, and whether everyone else knows that's their job too.
