How Belonging Experiences Vary Across Teams

Interview with ConsenSys’ Senior People Partner, Sarah Howe, for Sharehold’s Redesigning Belonging Research

Published in

Sharehold

6 min readNov 12, 2020

This post is part of an ongoing series in which Sharehold is publicly sharing our research that answered the question: “How does uncertainty impact one’s sense of belonging at work?” Access the insights here.

Meet Sarah Howe

Sarah Howe is the Senior People Partner at ConsenSys, a blockchain company well-known for its cutting-edge technology and remote-first work culture. As part of Sharehold’s research on redesigning belonging at work for uncertainty, we interviewed Sarah as an HR, talent, and culture leader and checked in on how her team adjusted to (and was ahead of the curve for) COVID-19’s shelter-on-place orders.

Sarah’s interview highlighted a few themes:

How belonging experiences differ between employee segments
The order of operations a company must undertake before focusing on belonging
Why the ability to fail safely is critical for high-tech companies
The critical link between belonging and company culture

Read on for a few selections from our interview with Sarah:

How do you define belonging at ConsenSys?

“It’s something that we’ve not previously, explicitly articulated at ConsenSys. Most certainly, with COVID, [the murder of] George Floyd, and the protests, belonging is really coming into the spotlight for us. In fact, we’re about to run our annual employee engagement survey.

We’re currently more focused on diversity and inclusion and being your authentic self at work. We’ve successfully rolled out multiple training sessions for our employees, and have also held discussion sessions and industry leaders in DEI have spoken at All-Hands meetings to educate us all. We’ve also established employee resource groups and set up channels on Slack to keep the discussions going.

We are in the midst of articulating what belonging means at our company. We’re centering around what engagement means at ConsenSys, and tangential to that, belonging as well. With engagement, we’re looking at levels of enthusiasm and connection employees have with each other and with the organization, measurements of how willing people are to put in extra effort for the organization, feeling as though they are a steward of our business and that they can meaningfully contribute and not be afraid to speak up or test an idea and have it fail. We’re also looking at overall signs of commitment and staying at ConsenSys among other initiatives. ”

How does belonging relate to inclusion?

“Belonging and authenticity or inclusion are related. Being able to be your authentic self and feeling like you belong are closely connected. Being able to be your authentic self at work would hopefully lead to a sense of belonging.

“[We’re also focused on ] having the freedom to not only be yourself but to feel free to create, to feel you have a voice, and to feel free to express ‘off the wall’ ideas. We’re in a space in tech that is relatively new, this hasn’t been done before so there’s a lot of ambiguity. Being able to try things and fail safely is super important.”

How do you define loneliness at work?

“In the context of work, [loneliness is] feeling disconnected or potentially isolated from others that you work with. It’s not having shared common interests or values, ways of working, or approaches of working.

You find these really rich experiences and high performing teams when there’s a shared narrative or shared artifacts or even just shared stories. Not having cross-functional working groups, or teams, not having an opportunity to connect with people and build relationships leads to loneliness.”

How has this time of uncertainty, including COVID-19 and civil unrest, impacted your team’s experience of belonging?

“Our day-to-day operations very much remain the same. We’re a remote-first organization. We do have offices but most people work in a hybrid model. Some people go into the office some days, work from home others.”

“There’s certainly one group of people that really felt connected, like the ones that really engaged in lunch and learns and the happy hours. I think they feel even more as though they belong.”

“There’s probably another group of people that feel as though they belong less. Because they have been isolated, and they may not necessarily connect with some of those resource groups that we have established already… The lack of social interaction had an impact. There were weeks when I was really demotivated… People that were in similar setups or situations to me were feeling the exact same emotions.”

“The other group of people [impacted] were parents with children at home. The impact was huge for them. I had to give a lot of support to those people, helping them rebalance their working days, their working hours, and letting them know it’s okay not to be online constantly. We relaxed our OKRs for Q2 and encouraged employees to take the time to spend with family… I think that they really felt that as a parent they belonged to this organization. They felt comfortable performing parental duties without having to worry too much about work.”

“We also launched an initiative called Productivity Zero. We selected three days off over the summer months that were designated as no workdays. We strongly encouraged everyone to resist the urge to log in that day, and if you did, to not disturb others unless it was critical. The time out knowing that everyone was doing the same was greatly appreciated and we noticed an uptick in productivity following those days out.”

How has COVID-19 impacted work at ConsenSys? What challenges has the team reported as a result of these changes?

“Burnout is a massive issue. Everybody is working longer hours from home and with limited options to leave the house like we used to. Outside the Productivity Zero days, we’ve had to put out company-wide communications around taking time off, not working on weekends, and not working late into the evening.”

If you had a magic wand, how would you increase belonging at ConsenSys today?

“That’s a tough one! For me, it’s the foundational piece of creating the ideology and nurturing our values as a company and baking that in from the beginning, and having it known that it’s okay to show up as yourself at work. I think setting expectations is really, really important.

Culture is a big piece for me. If I were to wave a magic wand, it would be having a solid articulation of what our culture is, and an explicit outline of how we behave, how we interact, and how we expect everybody to be respectful to each other. Then, if I can add another wish to that list, it would be to have a more diversified workforce.”