Kat Vellos: Listen to the Employee with the Least Privilege

Expert Interview for Sharehold’s Redesigning Belonging Research

Published in

Sharehold

7 min readOct 1, 2020

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 Kat Vellos

Kat Vellos is a workplace culture consultant, author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships, and founder of Silicon Valley’s largest unofficial employee resource group for Black designers, Bay Area Black Designers (BABD). Well known for her work in cultivating adult friendship within and beyond the office Kat was recently interviewed in the New York Times about navigating a “quiet season” of friendships during this uncertain time.

As part of Sharehold’s research on redesigning belonging at work for uncertainty, we interviewed Kat as an expert in workplace culture. Her interview highlighted a few themes:

The human case and the business case for having friends at work
What she prioritizes above belonging — and what companies prioritize instead
The essential need that is filled with an unofficial ERG
Why belonging is everyone’s responsibility

Here’s a few highlights of our interview with Kat:

How do you define belonging?

“Belonging means a sense of connection that is devoid of hesitation, fear of judgment, reticence, or concern that any part of who one is would not be welcome. Belonging is the feeling that who one is and what one has to share will be welcomed, and that there will be space for it. It’s accompanied by a mutual desire to see and know each other in a meaningful way.”

“Desire [to know someone in a meaningful way] is communicated when people interact with each other with curiosity, intentionality, thoughtfulness, empathy, kindness, and an invitational nature — all of those things convey desire. There are so many things that people can do to convey their goal for connection, their hopes for the relationship, and how they want the other person to feel. Many of these actions can happen before spending time together. Then when we share a real-time interaction, we have a chance to make it more real.”

How does belonging relate to inclusion?

“Belonging is key to feelings of inclusion. The difference is that a person could have a feeling of belonging with one person, but not with the whole group. Inclusion is more from a group lens, and belonging can be on a person to person lens or with the group.”

Why is it important to have friends at work?

“Having one or more trusted friends at work that you can speak to in confidence and that you can get support from and give support to in a reciprocal way allows you to be a whole human at work. It’s not just about having someone to go through challenges with. It also means having someone to celebrate with when you have success or when you want to be recognized.

A lot of companies say they ‘want you to bring your whole self to work’. Then they penalize people for being in touch with their emotions, or for expressing ‘negative’ emotions like dissatisfaction or frustration. But the full range of your emotional experiences are a part of your whole self. You can’t experience real belonging if you can’t express how you truly feel. Belonging has to include the safety to be fully seen and heard without facing repercussions for opening up.”

“Having friends at work helps people get by, even when they don’t necessarily feel a larger sense of overall inclusion. But, ‘getting by’ is going to be limited in terms of their future, their perspective on growth in the company, their perspective on future career trajectory, and their opinion of the company overall.

Employees who feel lonely at work are twice as likely to get poached as employees who don’t feel lonely at work. More than half of the employees who leave their companies because of feeling disconnected at work, say that their departure was preventable. They would have stayed if somebody had talked to them, if somebody in leadership had spoken to them about their career path at the company, or asked how they were feeling, or asked if they needed support. Voluntary turnover costs US companies a trillion dollars per year.

From a business perspective, that’s an incredible waste of money. But it’s also a waste of talent. It’s a waste of people’s time. And unfortunately, it’s also a very upsetting emotional experience to have to go through that. It doesn’t make any sense from a human empathy perspective or from a business perspective.”

What do you prioritize above belonging at work?

“For me, honestly, nothing. Belonging matters more to me than money, prestige, or any other perks that a company can offer.

A lot of companies prioritize other things above real belonging. They prioritize efficiency, speed, saving money, making money… It’s capitalism. That’s the basis of our entire world — this financial system that focuses on money more than anything else.”

Bay Area Black Designers is described by members as an “unofficial employee resource group.” Why does an unofficial ERG need to exist?

“I’ve worked at companies that had employee resource groups for people of color, and had the wonderful experience of having multiple people from that ERG reach out to invite me to lunch or to get to know me, even though they worked in a completely different department. They expressed interest in knowing who I am as a whole person, when people in my own department weren’t even doing that. When I was new at the company, this made a huge difference for me.

Employee Resource Groups are vital for that reason. But you don’t need an ERG to make this happen. Any person of any background can cultivate belonging by being invitational and welcoming on a consistent basis.”

“In member surveys, our members describe BABD as essential. They say that the community gives them sanity, motivation, and connection when they have nothing else. They say that the BABD supports their mental health. They say it keeps them going. This is why it exists.

I am helping hundreds of companies with retention and they don’t even know it. These companies are not meeting their employees’ needs for connection and belonging. We don’t stop needing it because our companies don’t provide it to us. We all need it. Members find a kind of belonging in BABD that they don’t get in their own companies.”

Kat’s soothing WFH space throughout this time of uncertainty

What’s one thing companies can do to foster belonging at work?

“People who are in positions of power and who have hierarchical privilege are the ones who most need to model accountability and make the values of inclusion a priority. One of the ways that they can do that is by listening more.

Quite frankly, a lot of times I’ve observed in work environments, the HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) fills up the room before that person has taken any time to listen to anyone else. They don’t understand how this inhibits other people from sharing openly or from sharing unpopular opinions. They think being a leader means talking all the time and filling up all the airspace. They’re not listening to anyone else. They haven’t listened to the person with the least amount of privilege, or people who have a very different perspective from their own.

Belonging is not just one person’s job, whether that’s the leader of a department, the Head of HR, or the folks who run People Experience. It’s everyone’s job to model the behaviors of inclusion, to check in with people, and to remind the staff of the company’s shared values.”