The Significance Of Organisational Belonging

“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
The aforementioned quote holds true for all worthy efforts. 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 the most immediate repercussions for productivity. To belong at work, therefore, is a quest for making our professional journeys more meaningful. It is tied to the desire to take your organization to great heights, to care and to deliver. What 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 per cent of the respondents agreeing that a sense of belonging drives organisational performance. Furthermore, 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 per cent increase in job performance, a 50 per cent drop in turnover risk, and a 75 per cent 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 per cent 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.”

Belonging, therefore, is quite necessary for the success of an organization and the sustaining of 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 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 and given the unpredictable circumstances of today’s world, this synthesis must be maintained and taken into the future for greater benefit of all parties concerned. Mental health support, encouragement of teamwork. a culture of conversation among peers and between seniors and juniors at the workplace alongside strong diversity and inclusion efforts can contribute to such an environment. 

However, above all, belonging comes from inclusion in and commitment to a mission. When employees are committed to an admirable aim that is bigger than themselves and feels 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, and 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 done by encouraging good relationships at work, taking an interest in the contributions of people, keeping channels for feedback open 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 organisation that runs on the motivation of its committed employees and it is time to let cultures of belonging take over for ushering in a new, magnificent era of work.