Workplace ritual counterparts in Twitter.

I started me career in technology because I’m fascinated with people!  I found that technology provides me with a perch from where I can observe and understand people — or at least those people who are impacted by technology.  And I’m also fascinated by how people identify themselves in groups.  In my professional life, I focus on the workplace behaviors.  Outside of that, I focus on my community.  And I like to observe by participating in both.

Let me share a thought about the importance of rituals to group forming behaviors.  Rituals bring people together in time and space by providing a way to identify and participate with a community.  Now this is very apparent for people who follow a religion.  Most religions are flavored by many rituals — some as simple as the secret handshake, or an article of clothing, some that bring people together at a fixed time and place, some that ask people to speak or gesture in a formal manner.  There are many benefits to these rituals, including:

• Strengthening of Social Bonds: Those who participate in the ritual feel connected to others, even if they don’t know them well – or at all.
• Establishing an Affiliation: By performing a ritual that others see, you identify yourself with others who join in the ritual.
• Highlighting a Cultural Value: Rituals are typically created to promote shared values within the group.  The ritual itself serves as a reminder of what we agree is important to us.

A simple example is the Monthly Birthday Cake.  Many organizations have the ritual of ordering a cake and celebrating the birthdays of team members that month.  Whereas it can get overly complicated to celebrate individual birthdays, the once a month deal works out for many.  This ritual forces us out of our cubes and offices for a good 30 minutes and we get to socialize with our work group.  The people who get invited to the event are part of the group, others on the floor can watch and listen from afar, and perhaps get leftovers in the kitchen area — but if they don’t know those people, they are not going to walk over an schnorr some cake.  And the concept of the birthday highlights the value that we each should feel special and be celebrated.

In an electronic world, we create rituals too. Here are some in the Twitter world:

1. Promoting others.  There are at least three ways that people ritualistically promote others on twitter.

a. The ReTweet.  A ReTweet (or RT) is when someone forwards a message they received for the benefit of others who many not have seen it.  It to is a way to indicate that you find a message so interesting or important, that you want to help spread it. In both cases, you are promoting a person and a message to others.

b. Link promoting.  Many people will tweet a message “Enjoyed reading <link> by @name”.  This simple statement shares a link with your readers that you (implicitly) suggest they should read.  Moreover, many times people will add the name of the author, or the person who first suggested the link to them.

c. #followfriday.  Read about the FollowFriday  here (others like it here). The gist of the ritual is to inform the people who read your stream about other people that you think they would enjoy following.  This provides a nice service to your followers, since they can learn about others who they might enjoy.  This also serves as a complement to the people you are recommending.  It’s like sending them a nice thank you card.  Moreover, as people follow them (based on your recommendation), they gain the benefits of a larger network of followers.

2. The twitter groups.  There are a number of ways this is evolving.  The basic idea is that you can associate yourself with others via some other tool.  For example, you can join a twitter tribe (twibe), or list yourself in directories (such as TwitR, WeFollow, and Twellow).  I still think these groups are not very useful yet, but I hope  they will get better.  FriendFeed rooms seem to be more useful.  But the idea is that we self appoint ourselves into groups and follow those we want to follow (or be seen following).

3. The Twestivals.  There are many variations on this theme, but the idea is to ask many people to donate a small amount of money for a good cause.  The power of a good network is that many small contributions add up.

So I mention these rituals because they all have counterparts in workplace rituals:  

• ReTweets and link promotions are analogous to when people share information, verbally or by forwarding emails.  It’s quite common when someone gets promoted to a new position to see a flurry of forwarded emails spreading the news and sharing the congratulations.
• FollowFriday is an interesting combination of two other rituals.  The “Employee of the Week” ritual is where someone is publicly recognized for their work.  The “casual Friday” ritual tells us that we can present ourselves more casually as we wind down a productive week.
• Self-organizing groups are a very interesting dynamic — one worthy of more coverage than I’m going to do here.  But I have noticed that when employees are given profiling tools where they can add tags to their profile, there is a tendency for many to copy the tags of their manager.  This alone is an interesting dynamic — especially when you see patterns where employees deviate from this norm.
• Twestivals are similar to workplace giving initiatives.  A common form of this ritual is when you are asked for a small donation for a worthy cause, which then gives you the (social) permission to wear jeans that day, or you get a little pin to wear, or a flower to display.

These little elements of behavior bring people together.  It almost too simple to say, but let me: Honor rituals that bring you together with others.  It helps foster a collaborative culture.

Tagged as: Enterprise 2.0, rituals, teams, Twitter, workplace