Meghan M. Biro and Iain Moffat of MHR International on how to foster a culture of belonging at work — no matter where employees are — now and long-term.

A sense of belonging is something we all crave, whether in our personal lives or at work. Connecting with people that share our values and passions makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves. And for so long, that sense of belonging has come from physical interactions as well as, in recent decades, digital ones. But then the unthinkable happened, and the world shut down.

I think I've mentioned that the concept of "belonging" is far more powerful than "joining" (think about that when you write your 47th "join us!" social media job post...), but the HBR goes deeper, defining the value of having people feel like they belong to the company. (Note the juxtaposition with the white paper above where isolation and loneliness are going to be a real problem).

As a perpetual “outsider,” I struggle with the power of belonging when it comes to brand building (and advocacy, retention et al), but I have to assume there are many companies who actively want to create more sense of belonging as well as telling stories about what that means at that company.

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I will admit that my day job is forcing me to re-example some ideas I… well, in all honesty, I accepted without much inquiry. It’s a little exhilarating, I promise. One of those concepts is that of “belonging” at work. For years, we’ve heard variations on the idea of “bring your ‘whole self’ to work” which is intended to imply (for example) that black people can bring their black experiences (good and bad, and lately its a lot more of one than the other) to work and that we can’t expect people to leave those experiences at the door. We assume that we want people to feel like they belong at work, which encourage them to speak up and engage. But we haven’t always defined what we mean by “engage” or “belong.” So I was really interested when Josh Bersin broke things down on his site about what it takes to create that feeling of belonging. I would suggest that for a lot of people, the feeling that their work matters, that it contributes to a company’s success drives a sense of belonging as establishing an ERG or setting hiring targets.