Ritual Reset
Team rituals, like meetings and events, help people stay connected and make progress. Revisit your team's rituals once in a while to ensure they’re still working for everyone.
PREP TIME
5m
Run TIME
90m
Persons
4-10
5-second summary
- Get a comprehensive view of your team’s meetings, practices, events, and other rituals.
- Decide what to keep, improve, or remove.
- Brainstorm how to improve rituals so they work better for everyone.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
- Meeting space or video conferencing with screen sharing.
- Digital collaboration tool (see templates).
- Optional: physical whiteboard, markers, timer, and sticky notes.
PLAY resources
How to reset work rituals
Re-evaluate team meetings and practices to focus on what matters most.
What is a team ritual?
A team ritual is a repeated activity or work habit, such as a meeting, practice, or event, that helps collaborators stay connected and make progress.
Why run the Ritual Reset Play?
Teams get comfortable with rituals over time and may start going through the motions. Time is precious though, so revisiting rituals helps avoid getting bogged down with unnecessary meetings, unproductive practices, and other habits that may be holding team members back.
A ritual reset can help teams:
- Stay aligned with goals and each other
- Avoid stagnating
- Improve or get rid of habits that are ineffective or even harmful
- Adapt to changing circumstances
When should you revisit team rituals?
It’s helpful to revisit rituals on a regular basis (such as once or twice each year) or whenever there is a significant change in team makeup or responsibilities.
The benefits of team rituals
Research by Schippers, Edmondson, and West (2014) highlights that team reflexivity (benefit #1) – where teams collectively reflect on their objectives, strategies, and processes – improves the group’s performance, innovation, and effectiveness.
Other research shows rituals:
- Provide meaning by helping both individuals and groups understand their roles and activities within their organization, which creates a sense of purpose and direction.
- Manage anxiety by helping team members feel more secure, clear, and comfortable through structure and predictability.
- Clarify social order by defining and reinforcing hierarchies and roles in an organization, which increases order and stability.
- Communicate important values, ensuring alignment across teams and the business.
- Build solidarity by providing opportunities for team members to connect and bond.
- Develop a cohesive team identity by signaling who's part of the group and who isn't.
- Signal commitment by showing a team’s dedication to shared goals and values.
- Improve work structure, which supports team members in doing their work efficiently and effectively.
- Mark significant events by creating regular opportunities to celebrate achievements and recognize changes.
1. Prep the Play
Est. time: 5 MIN
Start by creating a new collaboration document, like a Confluence page, whiteboard, or Trello board. If you’re meeting in person, you can use a physical whiteboard or large sheet of paper and then transfer notes to the digital document.
Create 4-5 columns or headers, and label them:
- Rituals
- What’s working (Think about qualities you would want to continue.)
- What needs improvement (Think about qualities you would want to improve.)
- What’s not working (Think about qualities – or entire rituals – you would want to remove completely.)
- Optional: Comments for additional notes and context.
Tip: COME ONE, COME ALL
Invite all team members who work together often, including managers. If the full team participates, this “reset” will be more relevant after the meeting.
2. Set the stage
Est. time: 5 MIN
✍️ Prior to the meeting, choose one person to document outcomes and action items.
🤝 Create working agreements for the meeting, such as:
- There are no “right” or “wrong” answers.
- Always assume positive intent.
✴️ Restate the play's purpose: to revisit the team’s work rituals and decide what to keep, improve, or remove.
🗓️ Next, review the definition of a team ritual: a repeated activity or work habit that helps collaborators stay connected and make progress toward the team’s or organization's goals. It can be strictly work-related, strictly social, or a mix of both. Some examples include:
- A recurring team meeting
- A planning process
- A team social hour
- A recurring report for leadership
❓Then, ask the team: “What makes a successful ritual for this team?” Write answers in the collaboration document and/or on the whiteboard. Common answers include:
- Something that helps people feel connected to each other, their work, the company, or all of the above
- It advances the leadership team’s goals somehow, or there’s a benefit to individual teams
- When a repeated activity is beneficial for everyone involved, even if it takes time to see those benefits
Tip: DEFINE THE GOAL
Ask the team what they hope to gain from this exercise. If it’s “reduce our time in meetings,” revisit this goal at the end of the session to confirm whether the group feels they've achieved its goal.
3. Audit
Est. time: 20 min
Set a timer for 15 minutes, and ask the group to write rituals in the digital document or on sticky notes for the in-person whiteboard. Team members can look back at their calendars from the last few weeks or months to jog their memories.
When time is up, spend about five minutes grouping similar rituals and adding any other rituals that come to mind.
Tip: MIND THE GAP
Help your team by offering them some categories of work rituals, like sprint planning, skill-building, providing feedback, reporting, and quality assurance.
4. Vote
Est. time: 10 min
Remind the group how they defined a successful ritual at the beginning of the session. Then, give everyone a few minutes to review the audit and think about three questions:
🔒 Which rituals should we keep?
✅ Which rituals should we improve?
❌ Which rituals should we remove?
After reflecting for about five minutes, give the group another five minutes to vote for up to five rituals to keep, five to improve, and five to remove. You can vote by writing dots or initials on each card or sticky note or using features within your digital collaboration tool, such as the Trello Voting Power-Up or stamps in Confluence whiteboards.
Tip: MAKE A CHANGE
Teams might find that some meetings or reports to leadership are impossible to remove completely. Challenge each other to reimagine the ritual in a way that’s more effective for the team, while still serving stakeholders' needs.
5. Actions
Est. time: 50 min
Once all votes are in, discuss next steps for the top 3-5 rituals in each category:
- For the top rituals we’re keeping, how do we ensure they continue to be effective?
- For the top rituals we’re improving, what is one thing we can try to make them better?
-
For the top rituals we’re removing, who will remove them from everyone’s calendars, system, documentation, etc.?
As you go through this process, you might find that some of your oldest rituals would make more sense in another format, too. For example, your recurring standup meeting can be swapped for asynchronous weekly updates. Or a monthly training session is perfect for replacing with a Loom video tutorial. Effective meetings that are page-led can drive outcomes faster.
If the group can’t agree on if or how to handle a ritual, assign one team member to explore a solution after the session, and move on to the next ritual.
As you document the next steps, be sure to assign action items, owners, and deadlines to kickstart progress.
Tip: @ MENTION
Be clear about assignees and deadlines (e.g., “WHO will do WHAT by WHEN,” and use your go-to project management system to assign tasks when possible.
Follow-up
Check-in
Three to four weeks later, poll the group to see if ritual changes made a difference. How is the team doing? Is there anything that needs to be revisited?
It’s also helpful to reevaluate rituals regularly (such as once or twice each year) or whenever there is a significant change in team makeup or responsibilities.
Variations
Pre-work
Ask participants to audit rituals beforehand to shorten the meeting to 60 minutes. Then, start the meeting by giving the team one more opportunity to add any rituals before discussing and voting.
Still have questions?
Start a conversation with other Atlassian Team Playbook users, get support, or provide feedback.
Other plays you may like
Culture
Team Health Monitor
Assess your team’s health and determine an improvement plan.
Meetings
Page-Led Meetings
Better meetings start with a page that outlines the purpose, expected outcomes, and key discussion points.
Communication
User Manual
Help your teammates understand how best to work with you.
Debrief
Retrospective
Provide a safe space to discuss what worked and what didn’t.
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A team creates a rituals audit table in Confluence
A team audits rituals using Confluence whiteboards
Using the Trello Voting Power-Up, this team voted on which of their rituals to keep, improve, or remove.
Using Confluence, a team documents follow-up tasks and assigns owners at the end of the meeting.