How Startup Culture “Drowns” Belonging
Interview with “Charlie”, an HR Leader at a Startup, for Sharehold’s Redesigning Belonging Research
Curated by Sarah Judd Welch
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 “Charlie”, an Anonymous HR Leader at a Tech Startup
Given the sensitive nature of our Redesigning Belonging research, some participants have asked for anonymity. We’ll call this participant, “Charlie”. Charlie is the sole HR leader for a VC-backed, Series A tech startup of fifty employees based in a major metropolitan area hard hit by COVID-19.
As part of Sharehold’s research on Redesigning Belonging, we interviewed Charlie as an HR leader. Charlie’s interview touched on a few themes:
- The tension between belonging and professionalism
- Why the C-Suite overlooks belonging in favor of “hard” metrics
- How COVID-19 is increasing loneliness at work
- The illusion of belonging within small teams
- The opportunity for belonging beyond a culture of busyness
Here’s a peek into our interview with Charlie:
How do you define belonging?
“It’s feeling like you’re welcome, that you are part of the group. Belonging is an ease of being with people and in a space where you feel safe and welcome to show up with your whole self or the version of yourself that’s appropriate. All of your professional self is welcome, even if you want to leave your Burning Man self at the door.”
How does the startup that you work for define belonging?
“I don’t think that we define it. It’s sort of my role to define it and be an example of that. There’s probably a disconnect between a core value of empathy, something that we talk a lot about, and the space for people to give critical feedback, make suggestions, or question as one would think based on the way that we talk about empathy. There’s a disconnect between our rhetoric and the way that actually people actually feel on a day to day basis… It comes from the top. [Our CEO] should be the example of how to do it.”
There’s a disconnect between our rhetoric and the way that actually people actually feel on a day to day basis…
“The management team would say, ‘That’s not our responsibility. It’s not our job.’ One of the questions on our engagement survey was ‘I have a best friend at work.’ The immediate reaction was, ‘Well, that’s not our problem.’
Maybe it’s not our responsibility to help people have a best friend, but it’s an indicator to us and we need to know what that means and how about how people are feeling. We could talk about belonging and I could bring it up, but the initial reaction would be well, that’s not our job as an employer who pays them to do a set of work in order to advance the business. I would have to find new ways of talking about some of the softer stuff and figuring out how to tie it to performance and retention and the cost on the business when we lose somebody or morale is low. I have not found effective ways of having those conversations yet.”
“As a pretty small organization, we’re let off the hook in some ways. We see each other regularly, everyone knows each other’s names, and it’s hard for someone to slip through the cracks. This can create a false sense of oneness, inclusion, or belonging because we visibly see people. That doesn’t mean that we know who they are or how they’re doing.”
What’s the value of belonging at work and why is belonging important?
“The value to the business [of belonging] is that if you create a space where everybody can show up authentically and with honest opinions, you will build a better business… People who feel like they belong are more engaged and they work harder, and they’re willing to go above and beyond because it creates mutuality. You’re not just showing up for your paycheck — you’re showing up because you are engaged and invested in the organization.”
“If I think about where we are today and the workforce, to be pragmatic about it, the Millennial workforce is bringing a lot more of their emotional selves to work. They are looking for something different from work than Gen X. … The Millennial workforce wants to belong and feel connected to the organization and the people around them and their work. As HR professionals, we have to understand, we have to know that, and harness it.”
How has COVID-19 and this moment of growing uncertainty, including US police brutality and the murder of Black civilians, impacted your team’s sense of belonging at work?
“[For COVID-19,] we made the transition pretty effectively. We’re all able to do our work remotely. As a people team, we worked really hard to create more opportunities for connection. Several people have said to me that they feel more connected now than they did before, and it’s been especially true for three people who are full-time remote. Those people especially feel much more connected than they did before.”
“I did a survey a couple of weeks ago about people’s sentiment around returning to the office. It came up that people were feeling quite lonely. It was surprising to hear it from different corners, even people who advocated for WFH.”
“The anxiety we’re feeling around COVID-19 creates an additional cognitive load. When the team is working overtime, it reduces creativity; all you can do is get your work done. The violence and protests lately weigh on everybody’s minds. What do I do? What’s my responsibility in this? That’s more cognitive load as well. The more layers you have related to belonging, if you have to worry about how someone will think of you, that creates cognitive load as well. [People need] space to process, be creative, to engage with one another.”
If you had a magic wand, how would you increase belonging at your startup today?
“I would increase our budget by 50%. I want to work a standard workweek. I would pay for learning and development sessions.
I don’t think that those things individually increase your sense of belonging but by creating a space for investing in each individual, it will likely increase their connection to the organization. It will make them feel like we’re investing in them which should help them feel like they belong.
If you create more space for people to be creative and think, that would give people the opportunity to come up with a creative idea of their own. Maybe somebody would say, yea, I would like an ERG. Right now, nobody has time because they’re drowning in their work.”
Further Reading
Throughout our research, we’ll continue to share peeks into interviews and resources.
More on Sharehold’s Redesigning Belonging Research:
