Belonging In The Workplace

What is it?

We spend roughly ⅓ of our lives at work. Yet 40% of people say that they feel isolated at work, and Covid lockdowns and enforced home working further compounded these issues.

At the same time, companies in the US spend almost $8bn a year on diversity and inclusion training, but they’re missing the mark because they’re neglecting our need to feel like we belong.

We want to feel like we belong at work, feel supported, and feel like our company is helping our wellbeing. But traditional inclusion programmes aren’t working in the way they’re supposed to. Bias training often only highlights differences and makes them more salient, we’re still figuring out how to adapt to the post-COVID work environment, and younger generations are valuing different things in their offices than before.

So when you’re navigating hybrid working, whilst trying to onboard new starters, and managing intergenerational work culture clashes, all whilst continuing to deliver on income targets, feeling like you belong can sometimes be a tall order.

Why should I care?

Our working lives are a major contributor to our general feeling of wellbeing - being happy at work can make or break how we feel about our lives in general. And belonging at work is a key factor in our experience with an employer.

When we feel we belong, we feel more connected to our organisation’s values and mission, we’re more engaged, we perform and produce better work, and we’re overall happier. Not only is creating a sense of belonging amongst your employees important for their own wellbeing, it drives creativity, intelligence, and innovation in the workplace.

So how do we: encourage diversity, make everyone, regardless of their identity, feel like they belong, and foster an inclusive work culture?

Hiring Practices

Let’s start at the beginning. From the moment a new hire walks through the door, how do you make sure they feel like they belong in your workplace? And how do you make sure your hiring practices are promoting belonging and inclusion?

Seek out people who aren’t like yourself, expand across communities. Make a hiring plan, evaluate your progress. What’s working, what isn’t? Who can you bring in to help with that?

Quotas

Quotas are a known way of promoting diversity - they quite literally demand it. Let’s say your hiring plan exposed some skewed hiring data, and you’re considering a quota. Upside: quotas have done a great job in improving diversity in a number of countries. Downside: quotas aren’t always intersectional, and they’re only one step in a long way to go. It’s worth noting that the American Supreme Court just condemned academic quotas, which will likely trigger similar cases with workplace quotas soon. Will this rejection of quotas be contagious?

Decoding Language

Over the past decades, our vocabulary has been changing. As the world becomes more complex and nuanced, we’re learning about the stigmas, associations, and underlying assumptions that our language can often carry. Most job descriptions (and performance reviews, promotion decisions, etc) are still heavily gender-coded. Are you looking for a dependable and enthusiastic people-person? Or an aggressive, decisive leadership-type? Think about who you’re implicitly inviting to apply. Most of the time, we don’t even realise we’re doing it, but don’t allow yourself to reinforce stereotypes.

Communications company Textio has developed software that will de-code your language. Open-source ‘dictionary’ Diversity Style Guide has put together a guide to help organisations navigate this complex world with more nuance. Researcher Kat Matfield has made the Gender Decoder: a free tool that tracks gendered words in job listings. But you don’t necessarily need to invest in new software - sometimes a simple Google search or mindful reread can do the trick.

Even with the best of intentions, there can be an application gap. Women and BAME applicants are 20% less likely to apply to a job than their white male counterparts if they don’t fit every single one of the criteria.

Inclusive Onboarding

So you’ve hired someone new. Your onboarding process is going to be their first real experience with the day-to-day of their new job. This is where your role in making them feel at home starts. There’s a myriad of different ways of doing onboarding, and no two organisations are ever going to be the same, but here’s a couple of things to be aware of:

1. Highlight inclusion and belonging in your onboarding. Are there resources to access, contact people to talk to, programmes and steps in place if it goes wrong, training sessions to attend?

2. Charities are jargon heavy, and vernacular can be unique not just to your organisation but also between teams. Help your new starter speak your language by giving them the resources they need.

3. Celebrate the small wins. Your new hire is there because they believe in your vision and they want to make an impact. Let them start contributing early on. On the flip side, giving a new team member too much to chew from the get go can make them feel like a fish out of water. It’s a balancing act, but celebrating the small moments can help enormously.

4. Does your new starter understand your organisation’s vision and journey? Do you have a roadmap you can share with them? People can’t feel like they belong if they don’t understand where they are.

Shared Vision

One of the main reasons people feel like they belong at work is down to a shared vision. As a charity, ideally you’re hiring people that already feel a deep connection to the values and mission of the organisation. It speaks for itself that the people coming through the door already have a shared vision. But sometimes, in the 9 to 5, the end goal can feel out of reach or disconnected. How do we bring this shared vision to life every day? Think about allocating volunteering time for your employees, or bringing different teams and branches together on cross-organisational projects more often.

Employee Wellbeing

Of course, we want our people to be happy. They’re spending time and energy on supporting our organisations’ values and missions, and we want them to feel happy doing so.

The COVID crisis drove workplaces towards a new focus on how employees are coping and feeling for the first time in a long time. With more people burning out, and needing more support to get through the average working day, companies had to shift their focus to better wellbeing and inclusion plans.

People that feel supported in their wellbeing are more likely to feel like they belong, and less likely to get burnt out by the work they’re doing. But a true wellbeing culture at work is more than just the sum of wellbeing programmes. It’s a culture driven by a holistic top-down model that actually values the person behind the work.