Rituals as culture amplifiers (or that time Francisca and I won a lip-sync battle)
Summer Team Retreat 2024 — Francisca and I performing our lip-sync rendition of I Want It That Way (we won) Through the lens of our team rituals — from Sharing O’Clock to Team Retreats — we explore how rituals can anchor a culture in times of constant change, strengthen trust and creativity, and remind us that how we do things can matter just as much as what we do.
Rituals that ground us
Anyone working in talent management will tell you that the work never ends. What worked last year might not work now. We often contradict each other and ourselves. If you are on the decision-making side of things, you are likely to receive conflicting feedback. We are walking metamorphoses (as the great late Raul Seixas put it), and you'd better embrace it if you want to stand a chance of doing a good job.
Maze’s organisational culture is the melting pot of our values, the written and unwritten rules that govern how we act towards work and each other, our narratives, our language, our symbols. It grounds us through our ever-changing and inconsistent nature, and it is held together by our rituals.
At maze, we hold a weekly team meeting every Monday. On a regular week, 30 minutes have gotten us through team announcements, housekeeping, and OKR updates. After we’ve covered team alignment on work, we have a Sharing O’Clock ritual. That time is for us to share anything we want. It can be about a play seen over the weekend, a happy moment with a friend, or a personal difficulty. Sometimes it lasts 2 minutes, other times it takes us to the end of our allotted hour. Usually light, sometimes heavy. Not everyone shares, but we all listen and process it in our own way. This ritual helps us see each other with humanity, and it creates a rhythm of reflection. Making it opt-in respects different levels of comfort sharing personal things at work.
Every time someone new joins the team, we have a Coffee Tour ritual where new joiners are encouraged to have a quick coffee date with each team member throughout their first few weeks. This ritual is meant to accelerate trust-building and flatten hierarchy. It also distributes onboarding work and reinforces our collective responsibility for our culture.
Our annual team survey is a ritual that allows us to gauge the team's pulse across a series of topics and to face each other’s perspectives transparently. Sharing the aggregate results of all survey items (even the riskier ones) with the team is a key part of that ritual.
Summer Team Retreat 2022 — Rodrigo, Marta and Sofia competing in the Maze Olympics
Our team retreat ritual
Many other rituals colour our days, but we thought we would share a bit more with you about one in particular: Team Retreats. You might find them fascinating, impractical, or even cringeworthy, but regardless, we hope that they inspire you to rethink your own rituals at work and at home.
We have been doing team retreats for a decade. Usually, twice a year. We go one or two nights away from Lisbon (usually under a 90-minute drive) to spend time together, take stock of the last cycle, and align on strategy and goals. We usually go to a house (rented or borrowed) and self-organise the agenda and logistics.
The agenda for the two days is usually a mix of “work stuff” and “fun stuff” (not to say that work cannot be fun, but you get the idea). “Work stuff” has included items such as OKR reflections, trainings, financial and strategic updates, project-specific deep-dives, and co-designing new processes or tools.
As for the “fun stuff”, there is first and foremost the priceless joy of hanging out together with nothing special to do (we try to keep plenty of free time in the agenda for that). Beyond that, our team retreats usually have some sort of special activity organised by the team. This has provided some of the most iconic moments in our collective memory, and the bar keeps getting higher. We’ve acted out a murder mystery dinner. We’ve danced through a Maze Lip-sync Battle. We have competed for the best original fashion design in the Maze Runway. We have held two editions of the Maze-Olympics, featuring a variety of nonsensical activities, and competed in an original Game Show. Last July, we directed and acted in original short movies for our own Maze Film Festival.
The special activities are born from the creativity and drive of the team (often stemming from a lunchtime brainstorming session) and made a reality by a small team of volunteers. They work because this team is full of yay-sayers. Every time we surprise ourselves with what we can accomplish, that openness to try new things is reinforced.
Winter Team Retreat 2023 — Murder mystery dinner with the team, fully in character
The nuance behind the fun
As casual as this sounds, don’t be deceived, there are a few things that we watch for closely:
People have different appetites for time away. Not everyone has the same love for spending time away from home. As people come and go, the fabric of the team changes, and so do preferences. We have tried to mitigate these asymmetries by making the second night optional for those who want to keep the socialising going a bit longer.
People have different preferences regarding work versus play. Some of us thrive on a packed agenda, while others find it draining. Some look forward to as much fun time as possible, others feel weird if there is no actual “work”. We try to mitigate this through variation (even across retreats) and optionality. Julian has been hosting an optional morning yoga session for the brave for a couple of retreats now, for example.
It is not cool to encourage performative fun. Our more creative activities are beloved by many, but for some people, being in the spotlight feels like pressure and not fun. That is why we try to design activities that allow for different roles; not everyone has to go down the runway or be an actor – there is space for coordinators, designers, and so on.
Team retreats are not cultural band-aids. Retreats are one of our more spectacular rituals, but they should not be used to mask structural tensions. We do our best (imperfectly) to connect retreat insights to real follow-up actions and link them to day-to-day practices.
Our yearly team survey helps us collect feedback on the team retreats and calibrate as we go.
Winter Team Retreat 2021 — Tomás, Julian, Gonçalo and Afonso in a picture that looks straight out of a movie
Rituals as everyday illustrations of culture
We preserve this ritual because it embodies so much of what we want to keep as part of our culture: it strengthens bonds and trust, fosters creativity, builds a collective cultural memory and identity, models shared ownership, proposes a balance of work and play and, critically, sustains a “yes” culture.
Our team retreat ritual is, in essence, a cultural amplifier. At their best, rituals remind us that how we do things can matter as much as what we do — and the shared memories they create serve as everyday illustrations of the values we want to live by.
Team Retreat 2024 — Sofia, Cristina, Rita, Maria and Constança singing Backstreet Boys out loud (sorry, neighbours)