🥼 Systems and Rituals at Work: How Culture Takes Shape

Every workplace runs on systems. It's how information flows, how decisions get made, how projects move forward. When systems are strong, they reduce friction, create clarity, and make it easier for people to do their best work.

But here’s the thing: systems alone don’t create culture. They tell us how work gets done, but not how it feels to be part of a team. That’s where rituals come in.

What Systems Do

At their best, systems:

• Create clarity → people know where to find information and what’s expected of them.
• Offer consistency → meetings, handoffs, and decisions happen the same way each time.
• Build efficiency → less time lost to confusion or duplicated effort.
• Provide stability → when things get busy, the system carries the weight.

Without them, work feels chaotic. But even the most well-designed system can feel flat if there’s no space for meaning.

What Rituals Do

Rituals bring the human layer. They:

• Reinforce values → making culture tangible, not just words on a wall.
• Build belonging → repeated intentional moments that connect people.
• Create memory → what people carry with them long after the work is done.

One of my favourite examples is a company that used a giant plush red panda as a recognition ritual. Each week at the team huddle, the panda was passed to someone who had made a difference. It was lighthearted and even a little silly, but it built connection. It gave people something to look forward to, and became part of the story of that team. Years later, long after the company went through bankruptcy and restart, I heard the red panda still lived on. That’s the staying power of a ritual.

Systems + Rituals Together

It’s tempting to think culture is built through systems alone — onboarding processes, project workflows, meeting rhythms. And systems matter. They’re the scaffolding that holds everything together.

But rituals are what breathe life into the scaffolding.

• Systems keep things running. Rituals make them matter.
• Systems bring structure. Rituals create experience.

The best workplaces design both: systems that create clarity and rituals that create connection.

What We Remember

When people look back on their time at work, they don’t remember the project management software or the status updates. They remember the experiences - the inside jokes, the moments of appreciation, the little rituals that made them feel part of something.

That’s the real measure of culture. Not just how well the system ran, but how connected it made people feel along the way.