Improving Employee Engagement: The Case for Belongingness

By Abam Mambo
 
Now more than ever, companies seeking to improve employee engagement should lean in on Belonging – the sometimes mentioned but often neglected part of many diversity and inclusion programs.
By lean in, I mean companies who are serious about addressing some of the key challenges in today’s workplace – mental health, fair and equitable practices, distributed workforces, low morale, to name a few – should be having robust conversations, trainings and actionable plans to reshape their workplace into a community in which employees feel a sense of belonging.
This article focuses on why belongingness is crucial to employee engagement, and how employers can effectively leverage belongingness to improve employee engagement and simultaneously increase business revenue.
Why belongingness? In his study on the hierarchy of human needs, Abraham Maslow ranked humans’ need for belongingness to belong to a group or community as the third most important need following our basic phys...