The Belonging Effect

What happens when we move further away from each other: to our relationships at work, our support networks, our collective productivity and mental health? We’ve been asking those questions since start of the pandemic and one theme keeps coming up positive. Belonging.

Are we really more socially distant?

That phrase defined the start of the lockdown. The frenzy it caused in the business press jarred with our experience as a team. While physically distant from my colleagues, I was also invited into their homes and meeting their children for the first time when working from home became compulsory. I was laughing with clients in their slippers, as cats, dogs or kids launched themselves unexpectedly across their screens:

“Go and get the iPad! Put Dora the Explorer on!!”

The first indication that this theme had broader reach came from a short survey about Good Work we released two weeks into the lockdown. We asked people about the 21 aspects of working life below, measuring how they felt each would be impacted in the months to come. When the questions were grouped into the three basic motivational needs, we found people felt positively about their sense of belonging and negatively about their autonomy and competence.

Why should organisations invest in this work?

Put simply, it’s in their interest. There is plenty of research out there showing that making sure employees have a sense of belonging leads to increased worker motivation, and in turn to heightened personal and organizational performance (e.g. Chiniara & Bentein, 2015).

Our Good Work project aims to change that, and the findings in this article show why. The theme of belonging isn’t sufficient to drive Good Work, but It is an essential pillar that has been strengthened by the crisis we all face right now. That’s a well leaders can draw on to galvanise people against all this crisis. In this context, belonging is not an outcome but a means: to higher-performing organisations and to happier, healthier teams.

As we have continued to dig into this work through our ‘Good Work’ project, we’ve become more confident and nuanced about this finding. Our latest survey (n=250) found the same strong belonging scores, but we could also see that women were reporting more positive scores (5.73 on a 9-point scale) than men (5.43). The gender gap was primarily caused by the question about ‘keeping to myself in the workplace’, which might be driven by a social pressure on men to withhold their feelings. When we explored the interaction between gender and age (see chart below) we could see this particularly affected young men. We also found that women’s belonging decreases as they get older while the reverse is true for men.

These are not random or abstract ideas to throw out into the ether. Young men, and we hypothesise, working mothers are vulnerable groups when it comes to belonging and their needs are likely to be different. And as we illustrate in our Good Work research, finding ways to meet those needs is not simply a question of happiness and wellbeing. It’s about maintaining performance in a challenging time for organisations. These issues deserve action.

Belonging by age group and gender

What about Psychological Safety?

In separate research on Psychological Safety, we found the theme of belonging cropping up again (these are distinct concepts - you can see the difference in the Good Work graphic above). Here, people felt most positive about the overlapping theme of inclusion - the belief that ‘we will be more willing to accept difference in the months ahead' was stronger than any other question.

The broader relationship between belonging and psychological safety is vital right now. If we are to come out of tough times intact, we don’t just need togetherness, we need to challenge and push each other forward. As you might expect, we find the two to be positively related to a moderate degree (r = .48) but the direction is less intuitive. When we look to the research, there is evidence that belonging is driven by psychological safety (Carmeli et al., 2009). It seems that creating the conditions in the graphic above helps employees feel a sense of belonging with their peers and manager, and that feeling becomes mutually reinforcing (Frazier & Tupper, 2018).

This is supported further by the positive relationship we found between people’s sense of belonging and their confidence in leadership (r= .46). We bring this together to suggest that a leadership intervention focused on psychological safety would also see a positive uplift in belonging scores. And that the more precise we could be about the area of psychological safety the leader should focus on, the more powerful that effect would become. This is one of the core hypotheses of our Good Work Project - also see our article on age and competence - the next stage is experimentation.

“There’s nothing fluffy about belonging. In fact, when leaders suggest as much they ignore hard evidence about resilience and performance. That sounds a bit fluffy to me. ”

The big picture

The human bias towards compartmentalising has resulted in a flawed approach to culture change. We see it all the time at MoreThanNow. Some projects are about agility, risk, reward or performance and are categorised as revenue-generating. Others are labelled as wellbeing or inclusion and are seen as something else entirely. You can imagine which get the most attention from leadership teams.

However, focusing on the constructs like belonging can help us to build organisations and teams where both psychological and economic needs are fulfilled. This is what Good Work is about: to make sure that the machine is functioning well, we take care of the gears.

If you’re interested in working with us, set up an introductory call and we’ll get in touch!