Concept of ‘belonging’ gathers pace amid rethink over diversity, equity and inclusion

Woodward is a 153-year-old aerospace company that required its male employees to wear bow ties into the 1990s. So Paul Benson, the company’s chief human resources officer, knew that creating a companywide diversity, equity and inclusion programme would require a seismic shift. “Look at our org chart online, and we’re a lily-white leadership team of old males,” he said. But employees were eager for a more inclusive culture.

“People want to feel like they belong,” Benson said. “They want to come to work and not feel like they have to check themselves at the door.”

Last summer, Benson started searching for a diversity consultant who was up to the task. He hoped to find a relatable former executive “who had seen the light”.

Instead, a Google search led him to a comedian and former media personality named Karith Foster, who is black. She is chief executive of Inversity Solutions, a consultancy that rethinks traditional diversity programming.

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Foster said companies must address racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-Semitism in the workplace. But she believes that an overemphasis on identity groups and a tendency to reduce people to “victim or villain” can strip agency from and alienate everyone – including employees of colour. She says her approach allows everyone “to make mistakes, say the wrong thing sometimes and be able to correct it”.

Benson was convinced. He hired Foster to give the keynote address at Woodward’s leadership summit last October.

Belonging is a way to help people who aren’t marginalised feel like they’re part of the conversation

—  Stephanie Creary, Wharton School

Shortly after taking the stage, she asked attendees to close their eyes and raise their hands in response to a series of provocative questions: Had they ever locked the car when a black man walked by? Had they thought, “Yes, Jewish people really are good with money”? Had they questioned the intelligence of someone with a thick southern US accent?

People raised their hands tentatively, even fearfully. By the time Foster finished, nearly every hand – including her own – was up.

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“Congratulations; you’re certified human beings,” she said. “It’s not about being right or wrong but understanding when bias comes into play.”

Foster, Benson said, helped people “feel okay with themselves, like maybe you haven’t been an activist or on this journey in your past, but let’s see how we can move forward”.

In other words, she helped them feel that they belonged in the conversation.

The question of belonging has become the latest focus in the evolving world of corporate diversity, equity and inclusion programming.

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Interest in creating more inclusive workplaces exploded after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Many corporations turned their attention to addressing systemic racism and power imbalances – things that had kept boardrooms white and employees of colour feeling excluded from office life.

Now, nearly three years since that moment, some companies are amending their approach to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), even renaming their departments to include “belonging”. It’s the age of DEI-B.

Some critics worry that it’s about making white people comfortable, rather than addressing systemic inequality, or that it simply allows companies to prioritise getting along over necessary change.

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“Belonging is a way to help people who aren’t marginalised feel like they’re part of the conversation,” said Stephanie Creary, assistant professor of management at the Wharton School who studies corporate strategies for diversity and inclusion.

She believes an abstract focus on belonging allows companies to avoid the tough conversations about power – and the resistance those conversations often generates. “The concern is that we are just creating new terms like belonging as a way to manage that resistance,” Creary said.

Foster contends that as a practical matter, there will be no equity if the people in power – “the straight white males”– feel excluded from the conversation. The people traditional DEI practitioners “most want to enrol are the people they’re isolating and honestly ostracising”, she said.

The obsession with this idea of belonging is the result of a corporate standard that is now widespread – bring your whole self to work. It argues that if you have the flexibility to work wherever you want, and the freedom to discuss the social and political issues that matter to you, then ideally, you’ll feel that you belong at your company.

“Bring your whole self to work” emerged before the pandemic but became something of a mandate at its height, as companies tried to stanch a wave of resignations. Companies were also responding to concerns that many people felt excluded in the workplace. According to a 2022 report by the think tank Coqual, roughly half of black and Asian professionals with a bachelor’s or more advanced degree don’t feel a sense of belonging at work.

Some employees were afraid to offend one another, so they defaulted to being ‘fake nice’ and ‘passive aggressive’

—  Andrew Anagnost, Autodesk

Last year, the Society for Human Resource Management conducted its first survey on corporate belonging. Seventy-six per cent of respondents said their organisations prioritised belonging as part of its DEI strategy, and 64 per cent said they planned to invest more in initiatives on belonging this year. Respondents said that identity-based communities, such as employee resource groups, helped foster belonging, while mandatory diversity training did not.

Irshad Manji, founder of the consultancy Moral Courage College, says an “almost offensive focus on group labels” is a big problem with mainstream diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. “It all but compels people to stereotype each other,” she said. “I happen to be Muslim, and a faithful Muslim. But that does not mean I interpret Islam like every other Muslim out there.”

Manji believes that people now use the concept of “belonging” as a “tacit acknowledgment that traditional DEI hasn’t worked well”.

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So what approach does work? In 2018, Autodesk, a software company with 13,700 employees, began planning a culture shake-up. Some employees were afraid to offend one another, so they defaulted to being “fake nice” and “passive aggressive”, said Autodesk’s president and chief executive, Andrew Anagnost. Others felt unsupported and would not speak up in meetings.

Autodesk renamed its “Diversity and Inclusion” team the “Diversity and Belonging” team. Managers learned strategies for recognising – and then counteracting – their own defensive thinking. They were given poker chips to “play” each time they spoke to avoid dominating the discussion.

The company paid the leaders of employee resource groups bonuses to signal their value. And Anagnost put himself forward as the executive sponsor of the Autodesk Black Network.

But the company also tackled equity. It switched the location of a new office hub from Denver to Atlanta, knowing it would have a better shot at attracting black engineering graduates there.

Autodesk regularly polls its employees about their experiences at work. After the culture shift took hold, Anagnost said that belonging scores increased for women and employees of colour, and decreased for white men.

“Then that normalised,” he said. “Yeah, sure, okay, there’s going to be some squeeze on opportunity in some areas as you try to increase representation in others. But the threat level goes down when you create a sense of ‘we can all rise together’.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times