Innovation Insight: How to Create a Culture of Belonging

At March’s Innovation Day, we welcomed Tamara Thorpe, Leadership and Organizational Excellence Strategist at Real Global. She shared her professional insights on how to behave in an inclusive way and foster belongingness in the workplace.

Imagine: you are the leader of an international company and your team members come from different countries and work remotely. Or maybe you are the CEO of a business that deals with clients, peers, and partners from other countries. And you wonder: how can you make communication within your organisation smoother and ensure your employees feel connected? How can you drive your team’s engagement and create an inclusive culture?

Diversity and inclusivity (D&I) training isn’t enough to foster workplace inclusion. Belonging is hardwired into our DNA, it is a basic human need and yet, it is often a missing ingredient in D&I training. Research found that 40% of people say that they feel isolated and excluded at work. To fit in, employees use different strategies: from adapting their personality to feel included, to avoiding social interactions altogether. When an organisation does not foster a sense of belonging, this creates exclusion, conflict and lack of collaboration, and employees are 50% less likely to stay. D&I training and recruiting strategies alone won’t lead to long-term change: effective leaders need to promote a culture of belonging for all employees.

So what can we do to foster belongingness in the workplace?

Find an ally. In order to create a workplace of belonging, focus on people and promote togetherness. Try to say yes to opportunities, let go of your judgments, and connect with others. Even if it might be difficult to identify exclusion on the spot, remedies exist: you can start by buffering employees against the negative effects of exclusion in the first place. Research suggests that having one ally can make people more willing to work for their entire team as it might reduce the fear of being excluded by other team members.

Develop strategies that will help navigate tricky workplace dynamics, but also drive change for better performance. Leaders need to take employee feedback seriously and:

1. Gain perspectives from others, understand the exclusion experience and others’ views;
2. Encourage mentorship and support mechanisms for everyone to belong, which can help with coaching employees through exclusion;
3. Find empowerment, restructure the team experience to make it more inclusive and engaging.

Epidemic of workplace exclusion? Take action! Building a sense of belonging requires active effort and practice. It’s a process of learning, which requires spending time understanding differences as well as accepting others’ views even if they are not the same as yours. Accepting others’ opinions does not mean agreeing with them but being open and intentional. Even if you don’t agree, you can find value and truth in others’ views and acknowledge them. Validation can strengthen relationships in the workplace. Creating a culture of belonging is also a process of unlearning: unlearn your own biases and take a critical distance from the assumptions which are often embedded in an organisation’s culture. Often accepted as an invisible norm, the white dominant normative culture can make people feel excluded. Only if you understand what informs the culture of your organisation, will you be able to question it and change it.

These are just some key highlights taken from March’s Innovation Day. Each month, clients of the Innovation Programmes receive a full ACT report, capturing the guest expert’s research, the implications and next steps for leaders to apply back in their team and organisation.

Sources: Thorpe, T. (2020) ‘Create a Culture of Belonging’, KnowledgeBrief Innovation Day Presentation, 11 March.