How is your team handling working from home? Are they feeling isolated working from home? Are you?
The answer could make a huge difference in how your team performs. According to a Cigna study, isolated employees are far more likely to struggle at work—and more than half of U.S. adults (58%) consider themselves lonely. Businesses lose $154 billion annually to stress-related absenteeism alone—and the effects of people who identify as lonely are even more pronounced.
Fortunately, you can protect your team from the drain of isolation. The Belongfulness at Work program is designed to address it.
When your team feels more connected, they’ll be more happy, more productive, and more likely to stay. You'll be able to do more great work together, and love doing it.
Belongful teams are better teams
In a remote workforce where so many suffer from feelings of isolation, belongful teams will have a huge advantage.
Members of your belongful team will report:
- Greater satisfaction with their remote work environment
- Improved motivation
- Feeling valued and recognized by management
- Greater sense of company alignment with personal values
- A healthier work-life balance
- A stronger belief that your company adapts well to change
Best of all? This program will show you how to apply some simple exercises to foster belongfulness in your team.
If you want to learn more, contact Tony Bacigalupo at tony [at] belongfulness.com.
The program
Our approach focuses on two key areas: personal connection and connection in the workplace.
Since so much of an employee’s experience with isolation extends beyond the workplace, we start there. We establish a foundation that nurtures a stronger connection to self and others, in a way that doesn’t ask people to get too vulnerable about their personal situations.
The point here is to establish curiosity and inspiration to try new things—doing this alongside fellow team members will also naturally help foster bonds.
The second area focuses on the workplace itself. Each employee’s experience in the workplace is going to depend on how safe and supported they feel, so we will identify where they are at and what they want to focus on strengthening their relationship with.
Preparation
You can measure workers’ feelings of loneliness and social isolation using our custom survey, which pairs our own questions with those from the widely accepted UCLA Loneliness Scale.
Part 1: Connection to self
There are 11 components of a belongful life. Which do your employees feel strongest in? Which do they most want to nurture? When your employees belong to themselves, they'll naturally be more inclined to bring their best selves to their work.
We’ll help your team to:
- Feel more connected working from their homes
- Reconnect with old friends
- Get active in their local community
The idea here is not to try forcing people to be more social—that will arise on its own as people feel safe and grounded in themselves.
We’ll build a foundation on things they already enjoy and appreciate, and never ask them to do anything too taxing.
Part 2: Connection at work
Better connected employees are more productive, more happy, and more likely to stick around.
As in life, an employee’s ability to be their best selves at work follows a hierarchy. Some employees will feel very secure and focused on ambition to grow, while others are going to need to establish a stronger base of safety and support first.
Challenges arise when an employee is focused on an area that doesn’t match their experience—for example, if an employee doesn’t feel fundamentally safe being themselves in the workplace, then many of the higher-level team-building exercises designed to elicit their best work might be difficult or even counterproductive.
We can help employees to better understand their relationship to this hierarchy, so they can focus on what would be most appropriate for them right now.
Your team will:
- Learn the hierarchy of connection at work
- Identify what they value at each level
- Discuss what they want to focus on
Employees will get to see what others value—which will both help them to think about what they value that they might not have thought of, and also promote empathy with fellow employees as they see what they value as well.
Impact tracking
After the program is complete, employees will receive a survey asking them about their experience. We’ll use this to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of the experience.
They will then receive a followup survey 30 days later, to identify what impact the exercise has had on their experiences after some time has passed.
Interested to learn more?
Reach out to Tony Bacigalupo at tony [at] belongfulness.com.