How to Retain Your Members by Giving Them a Sense of Belongingness
Using Organisational Psychology to Improve Member Retention [4]: Increasing Feedback, Play, and Safety to Inculcate Belongingness
This piece was the last in a four-part series on increasing member motivation, engagement, and retention, written during my time at bantu. As their editorial focus had shifted since (as had their publishing channel from Medium to their personal blog) this was not published, leaving the series unfinished. A little overdue, but I’ve decided publish it independently without a paywall as a publicly available resource.
Hope this is useful to you, and should you require help accessing the first three parts in the series, please email me at jerald@aya.yale.edu. Cheers!
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” — James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“Humans are social animals with the need to belong.” This principle of social psychology is one of the things that has stuck with me from my first introductory psychology class in 2010.
Our need to belong is an evolutionary developed trait that causes us to seek out others to give and receive attention, acceptance, and support in intimate, coherent, and meaningful relationships. This isn’t a recent finding, but one that echoes all the way back through history in observations and our collective lived experiences.
“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.” — Aristotle, Politics
While we gravitate towards others and this gravitation heavily influences our behaviour, this does not always happen readily, easily, or equally. Rather, our social muscle has to be guided and developed to extend to those in our outer circles the same empathy, loyalty, and cooperation we do to our in-group.
Thus, it is no surprise that developing a state of belongingness is a crucial part of member engagement, motivation, and retention, as detailed in the Role Characteristics Model (see below).
The third psychological state in the Job Characteristics Model (which the Role Characteristics Model is loosely based on) in organisational psychology is knowledge of results. As it was slightly narrower in focus as compared to the other psychological states and their associated role characteristics, I’ve made significant additions and changes to encompass other important organisational psychology aspects, and to expand it to belongingness.
How should we increase belongingness?
While organisations can increase belongingness through curating teams comprising of individuals with similar backgrounds, attitudes, and of a single mind, it is of interest to assemble a more diverse cast for the same reasons we have discussed for increasing task interdependence — diverse perspectives and more information, and the collective avoidance of narrow mental models. However, diversity can come with its challenges—for instance, “minorities spend 25–30% of their time worrying about how they fit in”. This is then where the three core role characteristics, role feedback, collective play, and psychological safety, comes in to ensure a sense of belongingness for a diverse cast.
Role feedback
Role feedback does not refer to the feedback that you give members (though that itself is important for providing role feedback, as will be later discussed). Rather, it is the degree to which members can assess how well they are doing from performing their role. For instance, pilots can see how well they land their planes, and psychologists can see their patients’ mental health improving.
However, there are various roles that do not inherently provide high role feedback, such as roles that deal with administrative or strategic work. For these roles, providing supplementary feedback (that should be, to some extent, positively framed and easy to implement) then becomes important to ensure adequate role feedback.
Incidentally, feedback also directly cultivates a sense of belonging. LinkedIn’s Inside the Mind of Today’s Candidate report distills the most cited reasons from their survey on what employees say they need to feel like they belong.
The top reason respondents in this survey gave, recognition, further stresses the need for proper role feedback. Other reasons such as feeling that one’s contributions are valued in meetings and feedback on personal growth also tie into role feedback.
Roles can also be redesigned to create or improve the inherent role feedback they provide members. For instance, certain outcome measures and achievements could be measured and regularly reported to members.
When members have knowledge of the outcomes they help to produce, they [1] become more aware of their successes and failures, improving their ownership and future quality of their work, and [2] connect with the beneficiaries of their work, increasing their sense of meaningfulness as well.
Connecting with beneficiaries not only engenders a sense of meaningfulness through task significance (as discussed in part two of the series), but a sense of belongingness with the community they are embedded in as well.
Collective play
“It’s all around us, yet goes mostly unnoticed or unappreciated until it is missing.” — Psychiatrist Stuart Brown comparing play to oxygen in his book Play
There are many ways of defining play at work, and Petelczyc et al.’s review of studies in the field provides us with a list of features used across various definitions of play. See their table below which examines which features various definitions of play at work has integrated:
With regards to fostering a sense of belongingness, we focus on play that is social in nature, meaning they have to involve interaction with others (Van Vleet & Feeney’s definition), where new social arrangements may arise (Sandelands’), or mediates important boundaries in social activities (Costea et al.’s), to name a few permutations.
While Petelczyc et al. highlight the need for more research to be done in the area, their study also highlight the potential social outcomes of play, which has been shown to:
- Increase trust between team members
- Increase bonding and social interaction among colleagues
- Reduce boundaries between hierarchical roles and relationships
- Produce a sense of solidarity between individuals of different status
- Promote a work climate that is creative, productive, friendlier, and has a strong culture of commitment
On an individual level, play has also been associated with reduced fatigue, stress, boredom, and burnout, and increased job satisfaction, learning, mastery, sense of competence, divergent thinking, and problem solving.
Additionally, play can help members feel comfortable with being themselves at work, which has been highlighted by many as an important element of belonging. Research highlighted in the aforementioned LinkedIn’s Inside the Mind of Today’s Candidate report has found allowing members to be themselves “led to greater retention, less turnover, and even higher customer satisfaction”.
So how can collective play be fostered? One way would be to rethink the selection and organisation of spaces in which your members work in. This article has a few ideas to get you started thinking about your office space.
However, depending on how often and what kind of work your organisation has to do when it meets, you could consider meeting at places that allow you to segue into fun group activities for a break or after work is done, like at a board game cafe or at a darts bar
If changing up your working or meeting spaces is not feasible, rituals could be injected into your workplace to catalyze collective play. Having a DIY breakfast or potluck session can change the way people relate to the space in which they would otherwise only use for work.
Celebrations of both personal and organisational milestones can be great excuses to collectively play, and can also shift conversational topics from work, opening up new opportunities for cohesion and new social arrangements.
Fundamentally, ensure that the environment you curate does not penalize an atmosphere and opportunities for play, and you might find your members themselves leading the charge in coming up with ways to develop a healthy culture of play.
Psychological safety
Another organisational psychology concept that is worthwhile keeping in mind when thinking about belongingness is psychological safety. Psychological safety refers to the degree team members feel safe taking risks or simply sharing their opinions with each other without feeling embarrassed, insecure, or fearful of punishment.
Google’s two year large scale study on team performance, Project Aristotle, found psychological safety to be the only common denominator of its highest performing teams and “far and away the most important”. Beyond performance, the study found that individuals on teams with high psychological safety were less likely to leave the organisation as well. This means that maximizing psychological safety is crucial for member retention.
Psychological safety can be cultivated by building relationships and trust with your members. This involves being more available for them, having an open door policy, or reducing lines of communication.
Another strategy for cultivating psychological safety is in framing and modelling a safe and collaborative culture. This is achieved by discussing work to be done as learning problems to be resolved through an inquiry orientation, and not an execution problems to be addressed with an advocacy orientation (detailed below).
We are loss averse, and viewing others as adversaries when problem solving can trigger members to “reestablish fairness through competition, criticism, or disengagement”. Instead, try to acknowledge your own fallibility and model curiosity by asking lots of questions. This makes members feel safe to do the same and carry the facilitation of this norm forward.
Final words on the Role Characteristics Model
I hope this series explaining the Role Characteristics Model has given you some insights and actionables on how you might build or transform your organisation to increase member engagement and retention.
It should be noted that not everything I’ve shared might work best for your organisation and for your members. It is important to understand your own unique organisational culture and individual personalities of our members to best adapt these strategies to your context.
Survey members frequently to find out their perceptions of these various job characteristics.
Clever use of Community Management Systems (CMS) like bantu Workspace can aid you in cultivating these different psychological states from your members.
If you haven’t read the previous pieces covering the other aspects of the Role Characteristics Model, you may access the introduction to this series here, an overview of how to cultivate a sense of meaningfulness here, and coverage of how to cultivate a sense of responsibility here.
“If a community management system (CMS) seems like something your organisation would benefit from at this point, check out bantu Workspace, a CMS that facilitates role feedback by providing members with a dashboard of their project involvement, play through cutting down time members would otherwise spend on routine tasks, and psychological safety through a unified records page for both your organisation & individual members and personalised messaging.”
This marks the final post of the series I’ve written for bantu, and as I am no longer with the organisation, I would also like to take the opportunity to say a few words to the team:
It was a pleasure to work with and learn from all of you (in an environment that cultivated all aspects of the Role Characteristics Model)! You are all super capable and inspiring people, and it’s great y’all are channeling that into something that can provide real social impact. Excited to see where this journey takes all of you, and for bantu to catalyze much needed climate action and other social changes in our time!
