Micro-Moments That Build Culture: Small Team Rituals with Big Impact

Can we have a moment of your time? It’ll just take a sec. 

When we perform a cultural overhaul, it’s essential to focus on the small stuff. Every healthy, solid relationship is a collection of moments, and in some regard, workplaces are the same. Brief experiences where we build trust, learn more about someone, find common ground, and navigate conflict.

Team rituals provide some of our best opportunities to collect these moments. When we guide experiences in a positive direction, a series of micro-interactions will build into a macro cultural shift.

Even if we’re starting from the bottom.

What is a culture debt?

A culture debt occurs when we let negativity pile up. It’s the sum total of everything employees don’t enjoy about a workplace. Examples include unresolved conflicts, unclear expectations, poor communication, and inconsistency. 

The costs of a culture debt are high. It’s associated with greater turnover and lower engagement. It creates inefficiencies across processes and harms a company’s reputation. 

Meanwhile, companies that invest in strong, positive cultures can see revenue growth quadruple. Large, well-known organizations may spend on perks, but you already know we can’t purchase a healthy company culture. Behaviors create culture debts, and behaviors pay them back.

Myth: Fun team bonding activities are expensive, distracting, and require too much planning. 

Consider how we may clean up the environment, such as a river or road. There’s an accumulation of litter–it took a thousand little negative actions to get here. A thousand (or fewer, to be honest) little positive actions will clean it up. It takes time and intention.

Many people confuse team bonding rituals with pricey parties and “creative” (complicated) rewards. Here’s why the small, positive habits we suggest today can help:

• They’re built into meetings, standups, and other routine communications. Now we’re running these occasions more intentionally, improving communication and increasing team involvement at once.
• They’re compatible with workflows. Whether it’s a portion of a meeting or team chat, we’re not having to pull people off task or create distractions. 
• They feel more “normal” and invite regular interaction. Ask a team in a broken culture to step aside for some trust falls, and cringe ensues. Effective team rituals let people make the most of their communication style and build bonds organically.
• They take minutes (if that) and are pretty simple. No need to delegate planning or strategize too much about execution.  

Fact: Micro-moments destroy barriers to building a positive workplace culture.

Now here’s why the little things at work are more important than big gestures and expensive rewards. In fact, they are the antidote to a few of our biggest cultural challenges.

10 positively miniature team rituals that really work

Incorporate these micro-moments into meetings, standups, breaks, recaps, and other routine portions of the workday. 

1. Lunch box check

Simple bits of info, such as what someone likes to eat–or their pitiful last resort for sustenance during a crazy day–create familiarity. Casually learning about someone’s sweet tooth or salsa obsession also helps us choose perfect, personalized appreciation gifts.

2. The welcome wagon

Build small traditions to welcome new employees onto the team. Shower them with virtual tacos, blast a certain song, or anything else that immediately lets them know this is a community.

3. Good morning! 

Saying good morning isn’t just a social convention. It sets the mood for our daily interactions. Never arrive or log in without greeting the team, even if it’s the first and last thing you’ll get a chance to say for hours. Others will follow suit.  

4. Post a quote

“Work is the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow.” – Don Herold

Each day or week, make a habit of posting a quote that fits the culture. It can be profound, motivational, or something funny a coworker said the day before.

5. Birthday rituals

Celebrating work birthdays is still effective when it’s a micro-moment. You can automate public birthday wishes with HeyTaco’s Milestones feature and let the team handle the rest, taking that cue to share well wishes of their own.

6. Your daily emoji

Emojis can act as fast, daily feedback. Take the temperature by having everyone drop the emoji that best captures their mood in the chat. It’ll be easy to pinpoint who needs a little extra patience or recognition, too. 

7. The tiniest win that ever was

Groups of employees are transformed into tight teams when small wins become just as important as huge achievements. From catching a typo to being the first to volunteer, celebrate the small stuff.

8. What are you doing this weekend?

Employees want and need to be regarded as humans with lives beyond their job. Invite people to share their weekend plans as you wrap the week up. It’s light conversation that tells us more about who we work with. 

9. The gratitude channel

Teams that use HeyTaco emphasize gratitude as a core value by making a special space for it. No matter what’s going on, finding a silver lining and taking a second to share it improves how we remember the day. Create a Slack channel especially for giving thanks. Simple, positive actions become rituals faster than anything else.

10. What’s on your desk?

Whether it’s a granola bar wrapper or an octopus-shaped paperweight, tell us all about it. Pre-planned show and tell is nice, but off-the-cuff revelations can be surprising, moving, or silly. Try this during a virtual all-hands and find out what’s just off-screen.

Micro moments and macro motivation with mini tacos 🌮

Did you know that small rituals also hold the key to learning how to improve team productivity? The essential ingredient is fun, and that’s what HeyTaco specializes in. Small, user-friendly, lighthearted, gamified recognition rituals. 

Start building a stronger culture on small, daily interactions for free.