Organizational ‘belonging’ is at the heart of every company’s survival

“You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.”

- Grace Lee Boggs

This quote holds true for each and every worthy effort. You change things for the better when you care and you certainly care when you belong. Drawing from this proposition, belonging is a territory of immense significance in the modern age of work. Work does not merely provide us with compensation for our labour, but also with purpose and meaning.

The emotional relevance of working cannot be denied and it has an almost immediate impact on productivity. To belong at work, therefore, is a quest for making our professional journeys more relevant. It is tied to the desire to take your organization to great heights, to care and to deliver.

So what then is belonging to the workplace today and what does it hold? How do we go about ensuring employees’ sense of belonging to their organization? Let us explore these concerns in some detail.

Data shows that belonging has been a sure-shot recipe for better performance. Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends report ranked ‘belonging’ as the top human capital issue that organizations face today with a humongous 93% of the respondents agreeing that a sense of belonging drives organizational performance. Harvard Business Review quotes a study by BetterUp to this effect, “If workers feel like they belong, companies reap substantial bottom-line benefits. High belonging was linked to a whopping 56% increase in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk, and a 75% reduction in sick days. For a 10,000-person company, this would result in annual savings of more than $52M. Employees with higher workplace belonging also showed a 167% increase in their employer promoter score (their willingness to recommend their company to others). They also received double the raises, and 18 times more promotions.”

Hence, belonging is quite necessary for the success of any organization as it helps sustain good performance. It is thus significant to understand what organizational belonging might mean in today’s world.

Since we inhabit times where work is nonstop, breakneck and sometimes 24x7, there is little space for an individual outside of it. Consequently, to find emotional substance at work is not just beneficial but also almost a necessity for survival and well-being. We are coming off a devastating pandemic and work cultures could not have survived had companies not made special efforts to care for their employees and if, on their part, employees did not feel attached to their organizations to deliver results despite unprecedented hardships.

Since work occupies gigantic swathes on the emotional map of our lives today, a friendly and open aura at the organization can ensure a lot of comfort. Employees must be allowed to be vulnerable and human, which may have seemed like a strange proposition before Covid-19. However, as the coronavirus experience has shown, humanity and professionalism can coexist at work. Given the unpredictable circumstances of today’s world, this synthesis must be maintained and taken into the future for the greater benefit of all parties concerned.

Mental health support; encouraging teamwork: This is a culture of conversation among peers and between seniors and juniors at the workplace. Alongside strong diversity, inclusion efforts can contribute to such an environment. It should be noted that belonging, per se, comes from inclusion in and commitment to a mission.

When employees are committed to an admirable aim that is bigger than themselves, and they feel like they are playing crucial roles in the accomplishment of that goal, they are bound to ‘belong’. In this regard, leadership is a key factor. The company’s leaders need to not only instill the importance of the larger mission in their employees but also consciously find ways to avoid exclusion. This can be achieved by encouraging good relationships at work, taking interest in the contribution of people, keeping channels open for feedback and being generous with praise and support.

While there is no fixed roadmap for ensuring a sense of belonging to an organization, it is pivotal to keep the fundamentals of openness, empathy and inclusion central to this pursuit. Belonging provides the decisive emotional fuel to the engine of human effort, which can elevate productivity to glorious realms.

There is no stopping an organization that runs on the motivation of its committed employees, in order to let cultures of belonging take over for ushering in a vibrantly magnificent era of work.

(The author is Founder Upsurge Global, Venture Partner of Silverneedle Ventures, and Adjunct Professor at EThames College)