How Does “Belonging” Connect to DEI

Cadre community. Hope you are doing well doctor e here. So glad to be with you all after a nice thanksgiving holiday. Hope you all enjoyed the festivity with your family, loved ones, and obviously being grateful and thankful for all that we have and all that we will have. Obviously faith and believing. I wanted to talk today a little bit about, sorry, I'm losing the grip on my phone here. Belonging and what does belonging have to do with diversity, equity and inclusion? There is a trend now that is well being, sense of identity with diversity, equity and inclusion, which I think is good.

But I also think that will be a high sense of belonging of your individuals, your constituents, people within your organization, your teams, your department, etcetera. If you are not doing diversity, equity and inclusion or no sense belonging. And here's why that's important. If you think about belonging, if you were to define belonging, belonging simply is how well an individual or group is received, reflected or respected within your organization. And that's through every aspect of your organization, images, policies, processes, practices, relationships, all of those other kinds of tangible as well as intangible things.

So belonging simply is that in a nutshell, reception, reflection and respect. If a person, to the extent that they feel received, reflected and respected within your organization, high sense of belonging. If they do not believe that they're being received wealth or, or welcome for who they are, if they don't feel reflected within your organization, whether it's in management materials, all of those other kinds of things, and absolutely, if they don't feel respected within your organization, low sense of belonging.

Now that is important because now you can take that into, now you can evaluate and assess how well your diversity, equity and inclusion plans, steps, efforts are going based on a person's higher low sense of belonging. So think about that as you move forward. That can be a measurement, that can be an evaluation metric. That can be, you know, how you begin to understand whether your efforts are actually working, whether your efforts are actually, you know, falling on deaf ears, not connecting, not being in any way, shape or form well received by, you know, whomever you're targeting, that's very important.

And then also it gives you an inclination and an idea of what to do differently. If an individual says, well, my sense of belonging is low because fill in the blank, you have a clear opportunity to address that specific measure of what it is that you could be doing. And so I see Shannon, who has signed on saying hello back. Hopefully you're following this because I feel like I'm rambling, but my point is this, if you're going to measure diversity, equity and inclusion. Belonging can be a great metric to do that, and your great metric to do that can be also the foundational metric to which you build from.

If you go from belonging, you can then step into what creates that sense of belonging. Once you get to what creates that sense of belonging, you can then now get into what can we do to create that high sense of belonging? What would that look like from a management perspective, from a leadership perspective? What would it look like from a client perspective? And now you can begin to build in all of these other foundational blocks with which you can become really, really good at assessing how well you're doing.

Belonging can be a great metric and measuring tool for your diversity, equity and inclusion plans. So that's the connection that I want you to be able to make moving forward. If you want to know how well your diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are going, look at how people feel in terms of their sense of belonging within your organization. I'm Dr. E. I will see you next week. Have a great rest of your week.