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This CX Mini Masterclass explores the concept of organizational rituals and the role they play in reinforcing culture and strengthening customer experience as a competitive advantage. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, shares some findings from her recent research on team rituals in the business context. If you are keen to learn about this cutting edge topic and hear some tips for shaping customer-centric rituals in your organization, then this episode is for you.
Organizational rituals are one of the most underestimated levers available to CX leaders. While much of the focus in customer experience management falls on strategy, metrics, and technology, the informal patterns that shape team behaviour — the rituals — quietly determine whether customer experience truly becomes a competitive advantage or remains an aspiration. Understanding how rituals work, and how to influence them, is an emerging frontier for CX professionals who want to move from good intentions to lasting cultural change.
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An emerging topic
Episode 66 covered the link between HR strategy and CX culture. HR strategy is the foundation of team culture, whether that’s a customer-centric culture or not. But there are many other things that influence attitudes and behaviors in the workplace. Rituals come from the culture, but also reinforce the culture, and for this reason, rituals are an emerging topic in CX management. It’s a particularly important area of focus in terms of how leaders can ensure that team culture supports business objectives, like the customer promise (see episode 69 for a detailed explanation of the customer promise).
Rituals haven’t been a major area of focus of CX professionals, so there is limited coverage and thought leadership on the topic. Business management academics have been pondering the role of rituals in the business context and, not surprisingly, this research sheds light on how this aspect of business management might be applicable to CX management.
Defining “rites” and “rituals”
Intuitively, we all probably understand what business rituals are: ongoing actions or interactions that reinforce norms. This interpretation is correct, but a duo of academics from the US and Brazil have come up with a definition that really puts things in perspective.
Ritual action, it is proposed, is a form of social action in which a group’s values and identity are publicly demonstrated or enacted in a stylized manner, within the context of a specific occasion or event. – Gazi Islamro and Michael J. Zyphur
Examples of this might include a dinner for employees, a speech welcoming a new hire or a manager’s weekly team huddle. It’s important to note that many scholars use the words “rite” and “ritual” interchangeably. In practice, people often refer to specific types or examples of ritual action as “rites”, and the term “rituals” as a broad generic descriptor (Islamro and Zyphur’s research goes into more detail on the background of this definition, should you wish to jump down the rabbit hole on this topic).
Different types of rituals
Not all rituals serve the same purpose, and understanding the difference between the types of rituals clarified how these might be applied in a business context.
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Rites of passage serve to “socialize” participants as an accepted member within the broader community. Rites of passage would include things like new hire onboarding.
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Rites of enhancement are public celebration of commendable behavior, intended to showcase model behavior and recognize individuals. An example of this would be a CEO shout-out in a monthly team newsletter.
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Rites of renewal are a stabilizing function within an organization. These rituals rejuvenate and reinforce values over time. A Manager’s weekly huddle is a great example of a rite of renewal.
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Rites of conflict resolution are just what they sound like, how an organization deals with a dispute between stakeholders within the community.
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Rites of integration work to establish an emotional unity or community bond. An example of this might be an annual team building offsite or even something less formal like a greeting ritual or how team members vents their frustrations at the water cooler.
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Rites of degradation are less common, but serve an important role and they may be a consideration during change management. Rites of degradation happen when an organization is going through a major change or possibly shutting down. These rites often involve reflection on what went wrong and serve to reaffirm the bonds between members of the community during a time of uncertainty.
Creating and reinforcing customer experience as a competitive advantage
It’s important for CX practitioners to be aware and vigilant about how elements of employee engagement, including rituals, influence culture. Culture can either support or detract from organizational objective. CX leaders want to ensure that rituals serve to fortify customer experience as a competitive advantage, otherwise they could find themselves permanently fighting an uphill battle.
For rituals to stick, they need to be organic, not manufactured. CX professionals should engage with executives and team leaders about the importance of rituals. They would also be wise to take stock of any company-wide rituals that are already in play, and understand what behaviors or norms these reinforce. Where rituals support customer-centricity, there may be opportunities to share these with an even broader audience (remember that many rituals start at team level and grow from there). Where rituals possibly undermine customer experience objectives, CX professionals may identify a need to gently redirect these.
If leveraged correctly, rituals can support CX culture and possibly even an organization’s ambitions to use customer experience as a competitive advantage, but not if left to chance.
Transcript
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Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.
If you’re a returning listener, thanks and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.
This is episode 70, the first episode of February. Regular listeners will know that the first episode of the month is usually an interview episode. And I do have one coming later in the month. But for February, I’ve just switched the order around a little bit, and I’m starting with a CX mini master class.
Today, I’m going to explore the topic of rituals in the workplace, and the role that these play in influencing organizational accountability and CX culture. Rituals are sort of an invisible force within the workplace. We often don’t think about them, but they play a crucial role in reinforcing beliefs, expectations, and behavioral norms, which are as important to a professional team dynamic as they are to a family or another community dynamic. I’ve only seen the topic of rituals pop up a few times in the context of customer experience, so it’s not something that’s a buzzword yet.
But I believe it’s something that we, as customer experience professionals, should be cognizant of so that we can play a proactive role in shaping how rituals support, and hopefully don’t detract from, the organization’s customer experience objectives. As we’ll discuss in a minute, rituals come from the culture, and they also reinforce the culture. So if your organization’s rituals are driving things in the wrong direction, it’s something you might want to change. If you’ve been looking to delve deeper into an emerging topic for customer experience culture and organizational accountability, and are keen to hear what the researchers say about it, then this episode is for you.
As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this, and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts that we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com, or decodingthecustomer.com. My interest in the topic of rituals started when a client asked me about best practices on the role of rituals in shaping customer-centric culture. Intuitively, I knew that rituals were repetitive, ongoing actions that reinforced norms, sort of like Jeff Bezos’ famous gesture of leaving an empty chair in meeting rooms to symbolize the presence of the customer as an important but silent stakeholder in business conversations.
Over the years, I’d heard some CX thought leaders refer to rituals, but it wasn’t a headline topic in the customer experience world. This sent me on a journey to research and dive into a bit of academic research to more completely understand rituals and their role in customer experience management. And today, as well as some ideas for how customer experience professionals can leverage rituals to support their customer experience management objectives. First, let’s start with the definition of rituals.
Ritual action, it is proposed, is a form of social action in which a group’s values and identity are publicly demonstrated or enacted in a stylized manner within the context of a specific occasion or event. Examples of this might include a dinner for employees, a welcoming speech for a new hire, or a manager’s weekly team huddle. This definition is straight from one of the most useful business management academic papers that I found on this topic. I’ll be sure to include a link in the show notes so you can reference this definition and see where it came from.
It’s important to note that many scholars use the words rite and ritual interchangeably. In practice, I find that most people refer to specific types or examples of ritual action as rites, and the term rituals is used more as a broad, generic descriptor of rites. Speaking of types of rites or categories, this is where I think things get really interesting because we have different types of rights for different types of things, and it’s important to understand the distinction between these. We have rites of passage, which are some of the most common in organizations.
Rites of passage helps socialize participants to be an accepted member within a broader community. Rites of passage would include things like new hire onboarding. We also have rites of enhancement, which are public celebration of commendable behavior, intended to showcase model behavior and recognize individuals. An example of this might be a CEO shout out in a monthly team newsletter.
Rites of renewal are another type of rite. These are a stabilizing function within an organization. These rituals rejuvenate and reinforce values over time. A manager’s weekly huddle is a great example of a rite of renewal.
Rites of conflict resolution are just what they sound like. How an organization deals with disputes between stakeholders within the community. Rites of integration are another type of rite. These work to establish an emotional unity or community bond.
An example of this might be an annual team building offsite or something less formal like a greeting ritual or how team members vent their frustrations at the water cooler. Finally, we have rites of degradation, which happen when an organization is going through a major change or possibly shutting down. These are much less common, but worth mentioning as they may be a consideration during change management. These rites often reflect on what went wrong and reaffirm the bonds between members of the community as they move forward.
Side note here, I worked at Washington Mutual Bank during the 2008 US financial crisis. And when WAMU was acquired by JP Morgan, it catalyzed a time that was filled with rites of degradation. As team members reflected on what happened, leaders gave talks reassuring team members about the future, and everybody made plans for what they were going to do next. Considering rituals in the workplace, it’s clear that we can think of a ritual as something that comes from the culture and also reinforces the culture.
So if your organization has rituals that reflect and reinforce customer centricity, these will help align the organization towards customer experience goals. For example, if the new hire onboarding rite of passage incorporates a special event, bonds a new team member with the community, and emphasizes the shared objective of customer centricity, it will reinforce customer centricity and help all new employees connect their new responsibilities to the customer mandate. If, on the other hand, for example, the CEO’s speech at the end of year function, which is a rite of renewal, always praises sales and efficiency achievements with no mention of customer experience objectives, it would reinforce the belief that these things are more important than customer centricity. In episode 66, I explored why the foundations of HR strategy need to be aligned to support customer experience.
And we can look at rituals in much the same way. As customer experience practitioners, it’s important that we’re aware of and vigilant about how the elements of employee engagement, including rituals, influence culture. Otherwise, we could find ourselves permanently fighting an uphill battle. So how do we change or influence rituals?
For rituals to stick, they need to be organic, not manufactured or contrived. The empty chair ritual works for Amazon, but it doesn’t mean it will resonate with every organization out there. Take stock of the big company-wide rituals that are already in play. What rites have been established and what do they reinforce?
As CX professionals, we need to encourage the correct rituals and maybe position ourselves to gently redirect the others. For that CEO speech at the end of your function, perhaps he or she isn’t even aware that they’re skipping over customer experience. So, see if you can get your CEO to realign their message. I’d also suggest that you share insight on what you’ve learned about rituals with the broader executive team.
Help get them thinking about how these things influence company-wide objectives, including customer centricity. Now, not all rituals happen at a company-wide level, and influencing team or department level rituals is a slightly trickier proposition. To do this, I’d suggest helping managers or department leaders become aware of the impact of rituals, much as I suggested you do with executives. You might also find ways to stay abreast of new rituals when they pop up so that you can encourage sharing information about the ones that work, while gently redirecting any rituals that appear to do more harm than good.
If you have a customer experience council or a cross-functional CCX meeting, that could be a good opportunity to talk about new rituals and highlight success stories. I’ve also seen a global organization that’s geographically dispersed take videos of rituals that started at a team level so they could be shared with the global organization. Look for the green shoots and share news about best practices. Maybe they’ll catch on elsewhere.
Perhaps there’s even an opportunity to make a little competition of it. Rituals are an exciting, emerging topic in the field of customer experience. So if you’ve already been working on rituals in your organization, I’d love to hear about it. And if you’re looking for help, evolving your organization’s customer experience culture through rituals or otherwise, please get in touch.
I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website. juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.
I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested, or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another episode. See you then.
Want to keep learning about CX?
If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.
Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy and culture change) or get in touch via email.
