Cultivating a culture of belonging is crucial to ensuring that workplaces are diverse, equitable, and inclusive, and that employees can perform at their peak to achieve bottom-line results. But this is an ambitious goal these days, especially in a world of work still feeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Two years after the start of the pandemic, COVID-related stress continues to take a toll on the mental health of workers. The prevalence of remote and hybrid work models makes it more difficult for businesses to address the myriad needs of their employees. Three-quarters of remote workers say they struggle to interact regularly with their colleagues, and researchers have long known that remote work can dramatically increase feelings of loneliness. Only about a third of U.S. workers say they feel enthusiastic and committed to their work.
It has never been more important for companies to create and maintain a culture of belonging so employees feel safe, supported and valued. One recent survey found that compared to employees who don’t believe they fit in at work, employees who feel a strong sense of belonging are a lot more likely to perform better and significantly less likely to quit or take sick days. Another survey found that more than half of employees who quit their jobs during the pandemic didn’t feel valued by their boss or their company or lacked a sense of belonging.
Talent and learning leaders have a role more critical than ever to play in bringing people together, whether they work side-by-side in an office or only see each other on video screens because they work at home or across the country. Here are four ways companies can equip managers and employees with the skills they need to ensure their workplace is a caring environment where everyone can thrive:
Gather feedback from employees. Creating a culture of belonging is all about people, but laying this foundation will require gathering and understanding data. This vital effort starts with listening to what employees say they value about belonging, diversity, equity and inclusion. Companies should conduct ongoing pulse check-ins to collect information over time. Then they should take a deep look at the employee insight they get at the organizational and divisional levels to determine where they should focus their training efforts.
Train everyone on unconscious bias. Unconscious biases can hinder a culture of belonging. In many instances, these biases lead people to behave in ways that can undermine efforts to build safe and supportive environments necessary for strong teamwork, idea generation and risk-taking.
Unconscious bias training can provide practical ways to minimize these biases and foster both belonging and psychological safety at work. Leaders can turn their workplaces into environments where everyone truly feels a sense of belonging and appreciation by replacing superficial, one-off training with longer-term, more substantial efforts that help people understand their own unconscious biases, change their behavior and measure their progress.
Coach your leaders and managers to take more emotional risks. A culture of belonging provides employees with a feeling of psychological safety at work. Employees should feel like they can share their whole selves with their co-workers and managers.
Before employees can do that, they look to their leaders and managers for guidance on workplace rules for conduct, behavior and interpersonal relationships. They also turn to them for subtle cues on the boundaries for what is acceptable to share about their personal lives — including details about religion, sexual preference or orientation, disability, veteran status, or health conditions.
It’s critical for managers to maintain professional boundaries when discussing their own personal lives or the private lives of their employees. But they can also demonstrate the sort of encouraging and compassionate leadership that cultivates a culture of belonging by expressing empathy and solidarity with employees experiencing challenges beyond the workplace.
Shift from recognition to appreciation. Employee recognition is crucial. It drives employee retention, engagement and performance. But hiring managers should teach the entire organization to do a better job of not only praising the end result but also showing appreciation for an individual’s unique gifts and strengths.
Too often, company recognition efforts only highlight the tasks or projects that employees have completed or the successes they have achieved. Appreciation, on the other hand, champions the specific attributes of the person who reached a goal or completed a project.
Companies should celebrate each individual who contributes to the organization. Which parts of themselves did they have to bring out to get a project done? Were they creative? Did they take risks? Did they stretch or grow or overcome a difficult challenge to complete a challenging task? These are the key questions to ask and answer so employees know they’re valued for their whole selves that they bring to work.
Fortunately, there has been an explosion of new tools and technologies that can assist HR, talent, and learning and development professionals in developing a sense of belonging at work. For example, national nonprofit Jobs for the Future published a sweeping analysis called Thrive@Work that reviewed more than 1,000 companies and tech startups focused on improving the experience of its youngest employees. It found that many of these firms had a special emphasis on improving company culture and employee belonging at work.
If talent and L&D managers appreciate the strengths and superpowers of individuals more often, employees will feel more confident about deploying their unique skills and abilities in ways that benefit the organization. Because HR professionals sit at the center of an organization, they have the responsibility to lead efforts to build a culture of belonging by integrating these concepts into every facet of the business and modeling these changes for both managers and employees. Ensuring that employees feel that their whole selves belong within an organization will go a long way toward recruiting and retaining a diverse and powerful workforce, and creating a workplace where talented people will want to be.
