Why we need rituals for joy at work and in life
Original Medium Post HERE
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And how to build them — a conversation between Carolina Espinoza and Michael Norton
Mike Norton is Harvard Business School’s Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration and author of The Ritual Effect. Carolina is Marketing and Communications Coordinator at East Boston Social Centers.
This conversation has been lightly edited for this written format. This blog is part 1 of 2. The full video is here.
Prof. Michael Norton (right) with his student from several years ago, Justin Pasquariello
Brief Introduction
I’m Mike Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, and my research focuses on ways that we can spend our time and money to make ourselves happier instead of more miserable.
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You have stated that you started out as a skeptic of rituals, how would you convince a skeptical now?
When I started studying rituals, I really thought they were something for people who are into crystals or something like that, and I was skeptical. I knew we do them all the time — we have birthdays and weddings and funerals, so I knew they were around us — but I wasn’t sold on them being a really important part of life and part of our well-being until I started studying them.
You see them in marriages, you see them in families and parenting, you see them at work, you see them everywhere in the world: people are using rituals. Sometimes they’re trying to get really happy and joyful; sometimes they’re trying to calm down; sometimes they’re dealing with grief; sometimes they’re trying to get excited. We use them for all these different purposes.
If we’re using something in so many domains of life, eventually, I said, there must be something to these, or we wouldn’t be using them all the time.
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In your book, The Ritual Effect, you highlight how incorporating more rituals can create greater meaning and overall happiness at work. What small practices would you recommend for those looking to be more intentional with rituals at work?
We started to look at the role of rituals at work, mainly because people kept saying, “Have you looked at rituals at work?” They thought they were really important.
One of the places we started looking, actually, was team rituals at work. Not team rituals like trust falls and stuff like that, that you have to do on corporate retreats, but little things that teams did to differentiate themselves and show that they cared about each other.
The first one that we found, just randomly, was a team that, during COVID, had to go online on Zoom, and they decided they would start every single meeting by each person clicking the emoji that reflected how they were feeling. So you saw their whole screen of all the faces, and you got kind of an average of everyone. Then, you could also see, like, “Dave might need a follow-up because it seems like he’s struggling in particular today.”
It was this amazing way where they just told each other, “We’re not just like work colleagues, but we care about how we’re doing.” What was so fascinating was they never did anything like that when they were in person. It was the technology, actually, that allowed them to do the quick little emoji thing.
Then, we just started seeing everywhere that people were using these little, again, not huge rituals like people in robes with candles and stuff like that, but these little practices that teams did that they told us actually made them feel closer to their co-workers. We even see that it’s related to the meaning they find in their work. They’re not just going to work; they’re going to work and doing something meaningful.
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From your work in Ritual Effect and Happy Money, what would you recommend to a friend to boost Joy?
I’m a psychologist by training, and then I moved over to a business school, so a lot of the research I do is about how we can take little, small actions in our everyday life to change our happiness. We can also take big actions in life, like getting married or getting a divorce or getting a new job. Those things, of course, affect our happiness, but I’ve always been interested in the ones that you can do today.
So not “What would you do if you won a billion dollars in a lottery?” but “What would you do with five dollars right now?” or “Five minutes right now?” We really try to think in the research, “What are these small things that people can do every day to give themselves more connection with other people, to give themselves more joy in their interaction?”
One of the key things we see across rituals, across money, across time, is that when people use those resources on anybody but themselves. … And I mean anybody but themselves: they could be donating to a charity in a country that they don’t even know where it is on the map, or they could be buying lunch for a friend, or a gift for their kid. I mean, very broadly defined. When people are using and thinking about other people instead of themselves, that’s where we tend to see people get more happiness.
When people buy stuff for themselves — and, of course, we all do it, we all buy stuff for ourselves — that just doesn’t really do that much for us. So the overall recommendation is: use your time to connect with other people.
Rituals help us connect with other people. When we do cheers at a bar, we’re just using a tiny little ritual to connect with other people, but they make a big difference.
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Stay tuned for part 2 next week — where we explore why joy has been declining — and how we can increase it again.
Please share, subscribe, and join our movement by emailing me or supporting East Boston Social Centers. Look out each week for our posts about boosting joy the only way we can: in community.
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