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What Managers Can Do to Foster a Feeling of Belonging

Written by Angela Palmer, Director of Events & Marketing for Alliance of Arizona Nonprofits

When we think about diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, we often overlook one of the most important aspects of the work: ensuring that our employees feel like they belong at our company. This belonging not only encourages staff members, especially those at the lower levels, to speak up and enact change, but also ensures that employers maintain better staff retention rates and can help staff be more productive in their roles. There is nothing like a dissatisfied employee derailing forward progress because they are feeling unheard, unrecognized, and generally unhappy with their roles, workplace, or management. You may be asking yourself, regardless of what level you are in at your organization, what can I really do to help foster belonging at work? I suggest the following five tactics.

  1. Be authentic in your hiring processes. It is imperative that as you are bringing in candidates, you, as the hiring manager, coworker or HR professional, are authentic, open, and honest about what the work environment is like and what the team dynamics are. If you are a more laid-back manager, then demonstrate that in the interviews. Be free with laughing, smiling, wearing your regular day-to-day work clothing, and behaving like your normal self. Remember that the hiring process is also meant for the candidates to vet the employer, and the more they get to know the real you, the more comfortable they will feel as soon as they come on board.
  2. Model good behavior. Being a good manager is difficult because we need to get the work done, but we also need to make sure that our staff sees us doing the same things that we expect them to do. We cannot expect staff to work 70-hour weeks, be happy-go-lucky, and put work before all else because we can’t do that either. Show your staff what a good work-life balance looks like and walk the walk. If you can’t do it, how can they?
  3. Be vulnerable. As a manager, sometimes it’s difficult for us to admit when we need help, are feeling frustrated, or just to share a personal story here and there. We need to model this behavior for our employees so they can feel comfortable doing the same when there are issues. We are ultimately serving on teams, and we can’t get the work done without the full support of everyone else; that includes everyone at every level of every organization.
  4. Advocate for space to build personal relationships. Getting to know coworkers on a personal level allows employees to feel they have connected to a workplace in a more intimate way. Create dedicated space to grow those relationships, because especially as we get older, we make friends through work. Let’s help foster that by developing those informal spaces, whether it be dedicated getting-to-know-you Slack channels, 30-minute team “happy hours” with non-work-related questions, or group chats.
  5. Solicit input on decisions. When decisions, especially big ones, are made without the input of the staff, they can feel isolated and like their opinions don’t matter. But the work can’t be done without everyone involved. Taking an extra hour or day to solicit input from the team doesn’t hurt. It encourages staff to take ownership of those decisions and be more invested in the subsequent work that needs to be done to support that.

Fostering belonging is all about being transparent and showing your staff that you are human, you make mistakes, and you need help too. Help them be more successful by modeling all of that, and then everyone will feel like they can bring their true selves to the workplace.