Involvement & Belonging
Have you ever wondered how the top companies keep employees happy and engaged? Let’s look at the top five companies rated highest for employee satisfaction and find out what they do right. This series will discuss three themes that directly impact employee satisfaction that can be found in companies from a variety of industries. These companies are Cisco (tech), Hilton (hospitality), Wegman’s Food Markets (supermarket), Salesforce (software), and NVIDIA (hardware).
Why Involvement & Belonging Matter
There are many reasons why companies that focus on involvement and belonging have happier employees. After all, we all prefer working at places where we feel included and valued. Creating a sense of belonging can help create shared values. This is facilitated by culture, leadership, and relationship building.
Organizations that spend time developing involvement and belonging not only reap higher employee satisfaction but also typically see greater productivity and improved overall performance. This makes sense when you think about it. Employees that feel valued will likely take greater ownership of their work and happy employees will like being at work.
Creating an Inclusive Team
There are several ways that these top companies create a sense of belonging. One of the most critical involves working to form an inclusive team. Cisco starts this process during hiring by actively seeking out a well-balanced team of diverse people. This enhances problem solving and relationship building.
Adopting inclusivity in the workplace is not just for hiring practices. There are many things that can be done throughout the corporate environment. Encouraging honesty, discouraging groupthink, and creating a sense of psychological safety are successful ways. In fact, Salesforce emphasizes transparency through many initiatives like an instant feedback app for employees.
Sharing Passion
Help cultivate a shared passion throughout a team is another great way to motivate employee involvement and belonging. Companies can approach this in many different ways. Some encourage teams to give back together. For example, Salesforce’s 1-1-1 model illustrates a pledge to give 1% of their equity, product, and employee time back to local communities. Meanwhile, 95% of Wegman’s employees value the company’s philanthropic contributions to their communities.
Passion can also be developed by using a distributed leadership model and encourage employee participation in decision-making. NVIDIA believes every person’s background provides a unique lens, empowering idea generation from all employees.
Another means of cultivating passion is helping employees see value in their actions on the job. Cisco employees note how their technology solutions help serve the world while Hilton’s employees are empowered to help greatly improve the experiences of their guests around the world. Meanwhile, NVIDIA encourages employees to tackle problems that can contribute to preventing disease, building smart cities, and many other areas.
Ultimately, there are a wide variety of ways that organizations can foster a sense of involvement and belonging among employees.
