Casper ter Kuile: “How Can We Be in Real Community If I Can Fire You?”
Expert Interview for Sharehold’s Redesigning Belonging Research
This post is part of an ongoing series in which Sharehold is publicly sharing our in-progress research that seeks to explore and answer the question: What does it mean to belong at work in a time of uncertainty? Are you interested in receiving our research insights when they’re released? Sign up here.
Meet Casper ter Kuile
Casper ter Kuile is the author of the recent release The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities Into Soulful Practices, Co-Founder of research and design consultancy Sacred Design Lab, co-author of the groundbreaking community research “How We Gather”, and a Ministry Innovation Fellow at Harvard Divinity School. He is also the co-host of the award-winning podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text.
As part of Sharehold’s research on what it means to belong at work in a time of uncertainty, we interviewed Casper as an expert in belonging. With a strong perspective on the spirituality of belonging, Casper highlights how the changes that we’re seeing in the workplace right now are within a larger shift towards secularization, and this period of uncertainty magnifies how the workplace still falls short in providing sufficient relational belonging. COVID-19, global protests, and increased unemployment and financial insecurity beg us to ask, what is actually meaningful at work right now?
Read on for a glimpse into Casper’s interview:
What is the role of belonging at work?
“I’ll answer on a philosophical level, because, obviously, for most workplaces, and certainly in the private sector, the story that we tell ourselves is that everything is about profit. The reality is we make all sorts of decisions that aren’t just about profit, but we don’t talk about that enough.
The philosophical answer is, what if employers now understand themselves as carers of souls? That’s the thing that I’m interested in. We often have a narrative of secularization, that religion is declining. In many ways, the traditional metrics of religion are declining in America. But my argument is that religion is changing. So ‘where’ religion is happening is moving from religious institutions into places like the workplace. If you’re an employer… What if we suddenly see the workplace as an essential element of how we care for people, for spiritual well being?
What if employers now understand themselves as carers of souls?
That shifts, then, the role of belonging at work from being like, ‘Oh, it’s nice that we all get along so well’ or like, ‘I’m so glad that here we have this great sense of community of work’ and being like, ‘No, this is actually an essential element of what work means today. This is an experience of belonging.’
And now, I’m going to challenge what I just said, because that also raises one hundred ethical questions of ‘How can we be in real community if I can fire you?’ That’s a real danger, I think, to the narrative of ‘We’re like a family here.’”
How does ritual foster a sense of belonging at work?
“How we move our bodies can instill a sense of connection just as well as conversation. Ritual movement and ritual participation very quickly gives us a sense of being part of something bigger. If you think about dance, if you think about music, if you think about even sharing silence — all of those are really effective ways of being together and really effective ways for people to identify, to kind of de-center the individual and feel part of the collective. Ritual behavior is often about helping us do that, especially because rituals are never values neutral. They hold a story or a myth or set of values. We use ritual as a way to affirm who we want to be together.”
What is prioritized above belonging at work?
“We live in a culture of productivity [and] obsession, a classic hallmark of white supremacy, where we place the assumed needs of the market above the well being of individual people.
One of the things that we’re really clear on is [Sacred Design Lab’s] triptych of belonging, becoming, beyond. We start with the affirmation of the inherent dignity and worth of every individual and the sufficiency of existence before we talk about becoming — which is about growth. You start with belonging before you talk about growth, because otherwise if you start with becoming, you’re always going to start with the sense of, ‘I’m not enough, I have to be better, I have to achieve more, I have to produce more, and then I’ll achieve belonging.’ And so for us [at Sacred Design], it’s the other way around.
Once you feel like you belong, inherently, you’re going to want to grow.
It’s more important to treat people a certain way than it is to have an additional 2% in margins or whatever. If you want to build a community, if you want to build a workplace that centers belonging, you’re going to have to have real conversations about what it is to be productive. Like, are you willing to put belonging in a place where it’s going to crowd out some of the other goals?
In my line of work, the means are the ends. Especially if you’re an organization that’s selling certain values to a customer, and then to not practice that yourself, it’s just it doesn’t work. Literally the quality of your product will suck.”
How might COVID-19 and this moment of growing uncertainty with COVID-19, US police brutality and the murder of Black civilians, global protests, and increased unemployment and financial insecurity impact one’s sense of belonging at work, especially as we begin to return to the office?
“One of the impacts of COVID-19 is that we are in this great turn towards what’s actually meaningful. The Greek translation of ‘apocalypse’ is ‘an unraveling’ or ‘an uncovering of what was already there.’ It feels like an apocalyptic time because we’re actually seeing how we lived and we’re saying, ‘Do we want this? Is this really what we want?’
People are spending more time at home. People are making food, more baking and all of that classic stuff and being outside in the garden or in parks. There is a sense of, ‘How do we actually want to live?’ We want to be in loving relationships.
What’s the point of earning all the money in the world if you can’t do anything with it?
And so belonging just becomes all the more important. What’s the point of earning all the money in the world if you can’t do anything with it? It’s that the relationships we have are the things that make life meaningful. And so, I think I think it fits absolutely within this moment that people are asking this question.”
Further Reading
Throughout our research, we’ll continue to share peeks into interviews and resources.
More from Casper:
- Casper’s book: The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities Into Soulful Practices
- Casper’s research and design consultancy: Sacred Design Lab
- Casper’s whitepaper: “How We Gather”
More on this research:
