Belonging at Work: How to Foster Inclusion and Collaboration
Image Credit: From Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities, illustrated by Rose Jaffe.
Belonging is essential to building collaborative, inclusive, thriving communities and organizations. How might design frameworks and tools help to foster more belonging in the workplace?
Dr. Susie Wise is an educator, designer, and author of Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities. Susie founded and led the K12 Lab at the d.school at Stanford University and practices co-design across sectors as part of the Design for Emergence collective, a group that uses design to equitably change systems.
In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Susie shares why belonging is important for organizations, how to uncover opportunities to create more inclusivity and connection, and tools and levers of design you can use to invite collaboration.
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The Role of Design in Belonging
Foundational Elements of Belonging
3 Examples of Designing for Belonging
A Definition of Belonging
According to Susie, belonging is the feeling of being welcomed and honored so you can be your full self. In contrast, othering is the opposite, being made to feel like you don't belong and are not invited to participate.
Belonging is important because it enables us to fully engage, cooperate, and collaborate at work, especially in the creative process. Susie explains that it’s a necessary ingredient to be able to actually feel that you can make a contribution.
Note: Susie and Coe note that it’s important to acknowledge their own identities in this conversation around belonging. As people who identify as white cisgendered women, they bring to this topic an awareness of their power, privilege, and responsibility. They also note that their experiences are grounded in a mostly US context.
“Belonging at the end of the day is a necessary feeling for humans to be able to learn and grow.”
Susie Wise
The Role of Design in Belonging
Susie says that everything we experience is designed, whether it's a place, experience, or curriculum—and we're all designers in our various roles in life because we’re creating conditions where people will either feel like they belong or not, whether it’s a meeting at work or a shared meal. As a result, we need to think about the outcomes of what we create, and pay attention to who feels like they belong and who doesn't.
If you want to learn more about how to create a culture of belonging on your team, check out our online course Cultivating Creative Collaboration.
Foundational Elements of Belonging
Designing for belonging is about intentionally designing moments that invite people to fully show up and be themselves. Susie says that this requires a deep understanding of the feeling of belonging, tuning into specific moments, and designing intentional actions to create belonging. These are the 3 foundational elements of belonging:
1. Feeling
Susie emphasizes that belonging is not just an idea, but a feeling that we experience in our bodies. It happens when we are invited to show up, and to share who we are and what we have to contribute. It's important to consider this feeling when designing for belonging.
2. Moments
Design thrives in specificity. Focus on specific moments of belonging, because belonging isn’t generalized. Susie says there are many common moments that matter in an experience, including the moments of:
- Invitation
- Entering
- Participating
- Code switching
- Contributing
- Flowing
- Dissenting
- Repairing
- Diverging and exiting
Image Credit: From Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities, illustrated by Rose Jaffe.
Beyond just emails and meetings, Susie says that there are many levers that we can use to create change and influence. To redesign a particular moment, you can get creative with which levers you use to do it. Some examples of levers include:
- Space
- Roles
- Rituals
- Events
- Groupings
- Communication
- Clothing
- Food
- Schedules and rhythms
“There’s a reason we call it a sense of belonging. It’s because it’s a feeling in our body.”
Susie Wise
3 Examples of Designing for Belonging
Contribution, dissent, and repair are all “moments” that can help to create a sense of belonging. Susie gives three examples of how a team or a community tuned into these moments, then designed a lever for belonging:
- Contribution: Susie gives the example of a small social justice design practice in Chicago discussing which holidays to celebrate and have time off for. Initially, the company planned to follow only US holidays, but after a team conversation, it decided to include Ghanaian Independence Day and Diwali. This decision allowed the team to celebrate the holidays that mattered to them, and showed how schedules and rhythms can be leveraged as a design tool to create a sense of belonging.
- Dissent: Susie notes that American business culture doesn't have great ways of sharing differing opinions, so it's helpful to create ways to call forth dissent. She’s worked with teams that put a hat on the table, which anyone can pick up to dissent and offer a differing view. It’s important to note that power and privilege can make it more difficult for certain groups to offer dissent, particularly marginalized groups.
- Repair: Susie shares a story about a small college that made a move to eliminate one of their sports based on community input and consultation, but didn't address the effects of that decision on the athletes. They then asked themselves the design question, “How might we support athletes in a moment of repair?” They ended up considering different possibilities for repair, such as a space to have deeper conversations and allow people to process their feelings.
About the Speaker
Dr. Susie Wise
Designer & Educator
Dr. Susie Wise is an educator and a designer. Susie practices co-design across sectors as part of the Design for Emergence collective. She is a co-creator of Liberatory Design and her new book is Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities (2022). She founded and led the K12 Lab at the d.school at Stanford University. She lives in Oakland, California with her family and their talented dog Hijiki.
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