Belonging can feel abstract until we start looking at the conditions underneath it.
Key Takeaways | TL;DR
- Belonging is difficult to strengthen if we leave it as an abstract idea or another culture score.
- At Thrive, we look at belonging through three conditions: Authenticity, Connection and Value.
- These conditions help us explore what working somewhere actually feels like, rather than simply whether employees say they belong.
- Belonging is a lens, not a diagnosis. If one of these conditions appears weaker, the next job is understanding what may be contributing to it.
- The same organisation can create very different experiences of belonging across teams, locations and employee groups.
Belonging is one of those words that most of us instinctively understand.
We know what it feels like to walk into a room and feel comfortable being ourselves. We know the difference between being surrounded by people and genuinely feeling part of something. And most of us can probably remember a time when somebody made us feel that what we brought genuinely mattered.
But put the word into an organisational strategy and it can suddenly become much harder to define.
“How do we improve belonging?”
“Do our people feel like they belong?”
“What’s our belonging score?”
They’re reasonable questions. But I think there’s a danger that belonging becomes another abstract People concept unless we can connect it back to the actual experience of working somewhere.
Because employees don’t experience “belonging strategy”.
They experience work.
What are we actually trying to create?
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this while developing Thrive.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that belonging becomes more useful when we stop treating it as one big feeling and start looking at some of the conditions underneath it.
At Thrive, we use three:
Authenticity: I can be myself here.
Connection: I feel part of us.
Value: What I bring is seen and valued here.
They’re deliberately simple.
Because if belonging is going to help us understand culture, People Leaders need to be able to recognise it in real working life.
Authenticity might show up when somebody disagrees with a senior colleague without worrying that doing so will damage how they’re perceived. Connection might be visible in whether somebody joining a new team gradually feels part of it rather than simply employed by it. Value might be experienced when someone’s contribution is genuinely noticed, not just when they receive an annual award.
None of those moments will define someone’s entire experience of work.
But repeated over time, they can tell us something important about the culture they’re experiencing.
Belonging isn’t the same as being happy
This distinction matters.
An employee can enjoy their job without necessarily feeling deeply connected to the organisation. Somebody can have close friendships at work while still feeling unable to be themselves around their manager. An employee can feel accepted socially but question whether their contribution is genuinely recognised.
That’s partly why I like looking at the conditions separately.
It stops us collapsing everything into one vague question about whether somebody “belongs”.
It also gives us permission to find inconsistency.
Perhaps Connection is particularly strong because teams have built brilliant relationships, but Value is weaker because recognition and progression feel inconsistent. Perhaps employees feel highly valued for their expertise but don’t feel comfortable expressing aspects of who they are.
That picture is much more useful than simply deciding the organisation has “good” or “bad” belonging.
And it gives People Leaders somewhere to become curious.
The lens isn’t the diagnosis
This is probably the most important distinction.
If employees tell us that Value feels weak, we shouldn’t immediately launch a recognition programme.
If Connection appears weaker in one location, the answer isn’t automatically a team-building event.
And if employees don’t feel able to be themselves, it would be premature to assume that managers need inclusion training.
Those might eventually form part of the response.
But first we need to understand what’s contributing to the experience.
Perhaps the issue sits within management behaviours. Perhaps organisational structures are creating silos. Perhaps workload, systems, communication, processes or the experience of organisational change are playing a role. Perhaps several factors are interacting.
The Lens of Belonging helps us understand what people are experiencing. It doesn’t automatically tell us why.
That’s where diagnosis begins.
Three questions worth asking
You don’t need to launch a new survey tomorrow to start thinking differently about belonging.
Instead, take something you already know about your organisation and look at it through three questions.
- Authenticity: Can I be myself here?
Think about whose voices are heard, whether disagreement feels safe, whether people feel pressure to hide parts of themselves and how mistakes or challenge are received. - Connection: Do I feel part of us?
Look at relationships between teams,sites and levels of the organisation. Consider new starters, remote colleagues, shift workers and anyone whose experience might place them on the edges of the organisation rather than at its centre. - Value: Is what I bring seen and valued here?
Look beyond formal recognition. Consider whose contribution gets noticed, whether employees understand how their work matters, and whether people receive useful feedback and opportunities to grow.
The purpose isn’t to give each condition a score and immediately create three action plans.
It’s to help us look at familiar information differently.
Belonging gives us somewhere to look
Senior People Leaders already have enormous amounts of information about their organisations.
Survey results. Exit feedback. Absence data. Employee comments. Manager conversations. Network feedback. Performance information. Listening sessions. Turnover.
The challenge is often not a lack of evidence.
It’s knowing what to make of it.
Belonging can provide one lens through which to interrogate some of those signals. It can help us ask whether an apparent communication problem is affecting Connection, whether inconsistent recognition is influencing Value, or whether people staying quiet in meetings tells us something about Authenticity.
But the lens should make us more curious, not more certain.
Because culture is complex. Employees are complex. Organisations are complex.
No three words can explain everything happening inside one.
Final thought
I don’t think the goal is to create an organisation where every employee has an identical experience of belonging.
People are different. Teams are different. Relationships develop differently. What makes one person feel connected may do very little for somebody else.
Nor do I think belonging should become another People initiative sitting alongside wellbeing, engagement and recognition.
Its value, for me, is more fundamental than that.
It gives us a way of looking at the experience of work and asking three deeply human questions:
Can I be myself here?
Do I feel part of us?
Is what I bring seen and valued here?
The answers won’t tell you everything that’s happening inside your culture.
They won’t tell you exactly what to fix.
And they shouldn’t.
What they can do is help make something as broad as culture feel a little more tangible. They can reveal differences worth exploring, patterns worth understanding and experiences that might otherwise disappear inside an organisation-wide score.
Then the harder work begins.
Understanding why.
Because you can’t strengthen what you don’t understand.
And before we try to create more belonging, we first need to understand what belonging actually feels like for the people who work here.
Understand How Belonging Is Experienced in Your Organisation
Understand before you act
At Thrive at Work, we use our Lens of Belonging to help organisations explore how culture is being experienced through Authenticity, Connection and Value.
Through our Discover work, we bring that lens together with existing organisational evidence and targeted employee listening to understand what may be contributing to the experience, before deciding where attention should focus.
