This episode is part of the Happiness Reset at Work campaign, where Klaudia introduces you to 5 drivers that contribute to building more satisfaction in our careers so that you can reconnect and re-energise with your work in 2025. 

The 4th driver of happiness at work is Belonging.

Creating a sense of belonging at work is crucial for enhancing happiness and satisfaction among employees. In this episode, Klaudia speaks with Kate Jones, founder of the coaching and leadership development practice Neon, who shares insights on fostering meaningful connections in the workplace.

Kate emphasizes the shared responsibility between leaders, managers, and individuals in cultivating connections, offering practical tips for those new to a company.

Hello, happiness seekers. My name is Klaudia and you are listening to the Happiness Challenge.

This episode is part of the Happiness Reset at Work campaign where I introduce you to five drivers that contribute to building happiness and satisfaction in our careers.

For each driver, I release three short episodes where I bring you science behind each driver with some set of coaching questions to reflect on it, hands on ideas to implement in your working life, and a piece of expert advice. And that's why today I'm here with Kate Jones, who is going to provide you with further insight on how to create the sense of belonging at work.

Welcome, Kate.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Kate, first of all, give us a quick intro of who you are and what you do.

Okay, so my name is Kate Jones.

I'm the founder of a coaching and leadership development practice called Neon, which I've been running for 13 years, which is chapter three of my career. Chapter two was management consulting and chapter one was social work and probation.

So I worked with people in the probation service, which was a very good grounding actually for working with people in organizations.

But my work now is all about leadership development and creating what I call deeply human organizations, which I think we will come back to in terms of the whole question of belonging and connection in the workplace. So I'm a coach, consultant and facilitator.

Thank you so much, Kate. And absolutely, like deeply human, like in itself, that phrase is.

I want to unpack it, um, because, Kate, Harvard Business Review just released a research paper entitled we are still lonely at work. And in that paper there say that one in five employees worldwide feel lonely at work.

And what even more interesting is that the fact that we might be spending more time face to face in the office or we are mandated to spend more time in the office, doesn't necessarily mean that people feel less lonely.

And since the sense of belonging is so crucial to happiness, if we think about it at individual level, from your experience, how do we make friends at work and create meaningful connections?

Yeah, big question. I think for me, actually there is a bit of a distinction between making friends at work versus having meaningful connections.

Because I think maybe from my own personal experience, particularly from working in a management consulting company, which means that you are very dispersed and disparate a lot of the time just because by virtue of the fact that you're working on client site, so you're, you're all in different places most of the time and it's very rare actually that you get any time together. I think that for me, it's not necessarily about making Friends necessarily.

But there is definitely for me, meaningful connection is absolutely critical to people. Feeling a sense of belonging and feeling a sense of investment, feeling part of feeling, having a sense of community.

I often talk about teams as being like professional homes. Our teams are our professional homes in a way.

And I think technology in some ways is driving people to be more isolated, even though more people are being mandated to come back to work. I was in an office earlier this week, a client organization. I was like, there's nobody here.

And they were saying still, really for us, nobody is coming into the workplace. So there's still post Covid. There's still more remoteness in the workplace, I think.

So all of these things, yeah, do contribute to a sense of exclusion and isolation. And in that respect, it's much easier to feel less happy and less able to be at your best or give your best contribution, I think.

Absolutely.

And again, that's exactly what the report very much highlights, that there is quite a lot that we still need to do in, in, in terms of that environment.

But if, let's say you would be in a situation where, let's say you just joining the company, okay, you knew you don't know people and you want to create that sense of belonging, you want to feel like you really truly are a part of the team. What tips would you give yourself to create those meaningful connections?

Even though we are the stuff, we work in hybrid, we may not see each other every week. What are your top tips here?

So I think the responsibility in my view is shared between leaders, managers and individuals. So leaders and managers, I think need to make an additional effort to create a sense of belonging and to create connection across their team.

So that's about being proactive to reach out, to check in with people, to continue to have team meetings, to invite people. I'm a big fan of inviting people to check in. So doing check ins doesn't have to take very long, it can just take five minutes.

But it's a means by which everybody has an opportunity to say a little bit about how they're doing. And it creates a bit more of a human connection.

You can spend weeks, months or longer without really knowing very much about the human beings with whom you're working. So there's definitely something about leaders and managers making the effort and the time and prioritizing connection time within their teams.

It's that kind of same old classic thing about prioritizing relationship and not just task. So that's, I think for leaders and managers and then for individuals, you do need to make an effort.

You can't rely on your leader and manager or your organization to do it all for you, unfortunately. And we all have our own, I think, individual relationship with belonging.

Some people naturally feel insiders, no matter what kind of group they're a part of. And some people, and I would actually include myself in this, naturally find themselves or actually feel more comfortable on the.

Not necessarily on the outside, but on the outer side.

So there's something about being aware of what your natural preference is and what that means in terms of the way that you're likely to show up, the impact that you're, the impression that you're likely to give, how open and welcoming or not you might appear to other people. So the first step is definitely about awareness.

I think sometimes we can think, oh, nobody's approaching me or nobody's making overtures for me in terms of inviting me in. But we're not necessarily aware of the impression that we might be giving ourselves. But then the second thing is actually to be proactive, I think.

And again, especially if you're working in, in a more remote or entirely remote team, there's nothing stopping you actually from just making the efforts to reach out to other individuals within your team to have a virtual coffee to you don't eat. It doesn't even have to be face to face stuff. But there's definitely something about being proactive.

I suppose the other thing that I would also say is the connection is there's something about.

There's the relationship piece to it, but there's also the connection to purpose, the connection to meaningful work, the connection to what is this shared endeavor that we're all about.

And if you're clear again on what your purpose is, and if you're lucky enough to be in an organization where that purpose is central to the organization's work, then it's a really powerful vehicle for connecting with other people. There's nothing more powerful than connecting to stuff that is really important to you and that is a kind of shared sense of motivation for you.

Yeah, thank you so much, Kate, and so many great advice and practical advice there from the fact that we might be running from a meeting to meeting, project to project, but we do need to make proactively time to spend with people, connect with people, have those curiosity, conversations with people.

And again, that idea of a teamwork that if we know what our shared goal is and purpose, we will have that sense of belongings because we working on something together. So thank you so much, lots of insightful advice there. And Kate, where listeners can find you.

Uh, probably the best place to find me is on LinkedIn, so if you search for Kate Jones Neon, then I will almost certainly pop up. Or you can check out check me out on my website, which is www.deeply neon.com. they're probably the two best places.

Thank you so much. And thank you so much for listening to the Happiness Reset at Work campaign. I really hope that this episode is impactful and useful for you.

I would love you to share this episode with others and subscribe to my podcast and newsletter so you don't miss out on any future content. Thank you so much for listening and as always, I dare you to be happy. Bye.