In 2025, very few HR or leadership decks make it to slide 8 without the word “belonging” appearing in a tasteful gradient. CEOs reference it in town halls. CHROs tie it to engagement, performance, and retention. Talent leaders thread it through employer brand messages. LinkedIn is full of posts about “creating places where everyone belongs”.
Meanwhile, in the real world, people are refreshing job boards on a second screen, wondering if they would be missed if they disappeared.
Momentum isn’t always progress, especially when you always end up back where you started.
Fathom helps you escape the loop. With insight, not intuition.
The promise and the reality seem miles apart. Belonging has somehow morphed into the plaster that’s placed over organisational wounds. Wounds we've seen a lot more of this past year; mistrust, instability, and leadership that’s still allergic to honesty, straight talk, and delivering on promises when the going gets rough.
Belonging did not suddenly become important. Work has always felt better when people feel part of something. What's changed is the level of need and urgency.
How we got here: fragmentation, fear, and the search for something solid
One big reason that belonging has become a Cultural Grail is that traditional work models have been put through a blender since Covid reared its ugly head.
Post-pandemic, many teams are still living in a permanent pilot of remote and hybrid arrangements. Some are in the office three days a week, some two, some never. People join organisations and never meet their colleagues in person. Local rituals disappear. Teams Chat and Slack become the default culture platforms.
Then you need to consider waves of layoffs and restructures, often communicated with all the warmth of an automated shipping notification. Even when people keep their jobs, they do not always keep their trust. This is what happens when you see good colleagues disappear in three line emails and priorities flipped every quarter.
Helping HR, talent acquisition, employer branding, and company culture professionals find careers worth smiling about.
Then there is AI transformation anxiety. Employees are hearing that AI will “augment, not replace” their roles, usually in the same breath as a hiring freeze. They are quite rightly asking: Will my skills matter in three years? Will my work still exist, or will it be fed quietly into a model and resurface as a cost saving slide?
In this context, employees are not asking for kombucha, they are asking for stability, identity, and real connection. They want to know where they stand and who is standing next to them.
Certainly, the employers I have spoken with can see - or at least sense - this discomfort. In general I think that employers are very good at knowing when their people are unsettled, and smart CHRO's know the old cheesy lines, like “we are a family”, now sound somewhere between naive and insulting. So where can companies looking to steady the ship go from here? In walks... belonging. On paper, it feels like the perfect remedy to an endless slew of cultural setbacks.
The corporate misunderstanding: belonging as engagement 2.0
The first mistake I see many organisations make is to treat belonging like engagement 2.0. Something that usually starts by making it another metric to manage, chart to improve, or an HR initiative to sponsor.
A typical pattern looks like this:
- Run a survey that includes one question about belonging.
- Announce that “belonging is a priority”.
- Commission a workshop series and a poster campaign.
- Add “fostering belonging” to the leadership competency model.
In these cases, belonging is treated as something that can be created with slogans, workshops, and events. Socials are rebranded as “belonging sessions”. New starters get gift boxes with “You Belong Here” slapped liberally across all their swag. It's shoved down the throat of anybody and everybody.
EBN
Underneath, however, the misunderstanding runs deeper. Many leaders seem to confuse belonging with being liked, or with feelings of inclusion. They assume belonging is about making people comfortable, rather than helping them feel connected and consequential.
But, they're wrong. Belonging is not simply about everyone being friends. It is about people feeling they have a place in the organisation, that their contribution matters, and that they can be themselves without penalty (even if that’s their “professional” self).
Most damaging of all is when belonging is quietly treated as an HR project instead of a leadership obligation. It lives in HR team's KPIs or worse, on a DEI roadmap, but is suspiciously absent from manager routines and senior decision making.
“Belonging is not a pep-talk at a town hall. It is not a poster. It is not a Thursday afternoon initiative. It is the lived experience of how people are treated.”
What belonging actually is: four sentences that matter
Strip away the campaign and you end up with a very plain, human definition.
At work, belonging sounds like this:
- I know where I fit.
- I know what I contribute.
- I know why it matters.
- I know I am not disposable.
Belonging sits at the intersection of psychological safety, identity, and meaning. Not corporate fluff. It is the difference between “I do tasks here” and “I have a place here”.
You can feel included in a room and still not feel like you belong in the company.
Someone can be invited to the meeting, their presence welcomed and ideas nodded at, and still sense that, structurally, they are on the edge. Perhaps their role is always first on the chopping block. Perhaps decisions are made in another room. Perhaps every reorg moves them further from the centre.
Inclusion is a moment. Belonging is a relationship. One can be staged, once, twice, as needed. The other has to be lived over time.
You cannot manufacture faux belonging
This is the part that makes slides decks and initiatives slightly awkward. Belonging is not something you can roll out. It is something you need to earn - much like trust.
You cannot “launch” belonging like a new set of values. You cannot decide at a leadership offsite that “belonging will be our theme for 2025” and expect the organisation to fall into line. You cannot build it through communications alone, no matter how good the copy is.
Belonging is the consequence of behaviour, consistency, and credibility. It emerges when what leaders say matches what employees see over and over again.
Announcing that people belong while quietly planning a surprise restructuring is like telling someone you value honesty while hiding the knife. Your people notice the gap, even if they never put it in those words.
“You cannot announce belonging.
You have to deserve it.”
This reality is uncomfortable because it removes the illusion of control. Leaders can create conditions. They cannot decree outcomes.
Helping HR, talent acquisition, employer branding, and company culture professionals find careers worth smiling about.
What really destroys belonging: the quiet contradictions
Belonging rarely vanishes because of one bumpy town hall or one misguided policy. It erodes through the unspoken contradictions in how organisations operate.
Some of the biggest destroyers look boring and administrative on paper. In practice, they can be brutal:
- Layoffs with poor communication. Cold emails, vague reasons, and survivors left to guess who might be next.
- Reorgs with no clarity. New structures appear with arrows everywhere and very few clear answers to “What does this mean for me?”
- Managers who avoid difficult conversations. Underperformance is ignored until it explodes. High performers hear “keep it up” and nothing else.
- Leaders who say one thing and do another. “We trust you” followed by time tracking. “We care about wellbeing” followed by a week of late night calls.
- Endless transformation with no landing point. Every quarter is a “new phase”. People start to treat strategy like weather.
- High performers burning out. The people who care most are often rewarded with more work and less support.
- Low performers or bad actors lingering. When there is no accountability, cynicism spreads faster than any internal newsletter.
Belonging is not usually lost because the coffee is crap or the office went hybrid. It is lost because leadership actions and organisational systems tell a different story from the values on the wall.
The reality is this... lack of belonging is a leadership failure long before it becomes HR's little mess to clean up.
What actually creates belonging: boring, solid, human work
If belonging cannot be manufactured, what builds it? Not comms along, but repeated, grounded behaviours.
Organisations I've seen do this well tend to be quite unglamorous about it:
- Clear expectations. People know what is expected of them, how decisions are made, and what “good” looks like in their role and team.
- Honest leadership. Leaders share context, uncertainties, and constraints instead of pretending everything is fine until Friday at 4:55 pm.
- Predictability and trust. The best don't promise zero change, but they do explain the why and the how before the rumours do.
- Managers check in properly. Not a performative “How are you?” at the start of a rushed 1:1, but real conversations about workload, priorities, and development.
- Strong team rituals and shared identity. Ways of working that signal “this is how we do things here”, especially in remote or hybrid teams.
- Real recognition. Not generic quarterly awards, but specific acknowledgement of contributions and behaviour that match the stated values.
- Respect, consistency, fairness. People are treated like adults, standards are applied evenly, and exceptions are explained, not hidden.
Belonging is built in the micro-moments: one conversation, one decision, one standard at a time. It shows up in who gets context, who gets feedback, who gets defended when they are not in the room.
It's driven by having high quality leaders empowering high quality managers throughout the organization. No poster can replace that.
Momentum isn’t always progress, especially when you always end up back where you started.
Fathom helps you escape the loop. With insight, not intuition.
Why talent cares so much, especially Gen Z
Younger workers are often described as “needy” on belonging. They want feedback, community, purpose, and a sense of fit. In reality, they are just saying out loud what many workers in previous generations absorbed quietly.
This cohort grew up through financial crises, climate anxiety, political polarisation, and a pandemic. They are entering work at a time when roles are changing fast and nothing feels guaranteed. It is entirely rational for them to look for safety in relationships and meaning, not just in a job description.
They also spot faux belonging quickly. Overproduced culture videos, “we are a family” language, and vague commitments to inclusion sit uneasily next to stories from interns and juniors on social channels.
When belonging feels fake, younger are far less likely to hang around in the hope of things improving. They'll leave. Often without a long explanation.
The controversial angle is simple: Gen Z is not unusually fragile. They are just too young to remember when employers kept more promises than they broke, and they are not handing out hall passes to anyone who has not earned their trust.
Belonging has become an employer brand issue
For employer brand leaders, belonging is no longer an abstract cultural idea. It now lives in public.
Talent perception is shaped less by what organisations say about belonging and more by how it is experienced and shared. Review sites, exit posts, and anonymous forums create a running commentary on whether people feel valued, heard, and safe.
There is also a growing layer of AI in the middle. Tools that summarise reviews and public content are increasingly surfacing belonging related themes first: trust, fairness, psychological safety, and leadership behaviour. If your internal belonging gap is wide, that Chat GPT research will not be kind.
That makes belonging part of your brand identity whether you like it or not. It can affect who applies, who accepts, and who quietly sidelines your organisation in their search.
This means that belonging is no longer a purely “internal” issue. It has crossed the border into reputation.
What this means for HR, TA, and employer brand leaders
For practitioners, the belonging conversation creates some difficult trade-offs and some practical opportunities.
- Stop treating belonging as a campaign. Treat it as an outcome of leadership, design, and systems. Campaigns can support it, but they cannot replace the hard work.
- Push for honesty on the hard stuff. If there are likely to be layoffs or significant change, belonging is not protected by silence. It is protected by clear, timely, human communication.
- Help managers do the belonging work. Training on feedback, clarity, and difficult conversations often has more impact on belonging than another initiative.
- Align EVP with lived reality. If your messaging leans heavily on community and care, your internal decisions have to back that up, especially in moments of stress.
- Use data carefully. Survey questions on belonging can be useful, but avoid them becoming a vanity metric. Watch the gaps between scores, comments, and what people say in exit or review channels.
Belonging will not sit neatly in one function. HR, TA, and EB leaders will need to collaborate more closely, because the story people tell about working for you is now inseparable from how they feel while they are there.
Closing reflection: the belonging reckoning
The belonging boom will eventually cool as a corporate trend. Another word will probably take its place. What will not fade is the memory employees have of whether they felt part of something real when it mattered.
Companies cannot fake belonging at scale for very long. The signals escape. People talk, reviews accumulate, stories circulate. The distance between what leaders say and what people feel is getting harder to hide, especially when every story becomes data for a future summary.
The organisations that treat belonging as decoration will keep chasing the next narrative. The ones that treat it as a test of leadership will quietly pull ahead in retention, engagement, and reputation.
Belonging is now a competitive advantage, but only in the most old fashioned sense. It comes from keeping promises, acting fairly when no one is watching, and explaining hard decisions like people, not press releases.
Belonging is not something you launch. It is something you live, day after day, in how you treat people when things are uncertain, not just when the camera is on.
Takeaways
What is belonging at work, really?
Belonging is not a mood or a branding theme. It is the practical sense that someone knows where they fit, what they contribute, why it matters, and that they are not disposable. Inclusion moments help, but they are not enough on their own.
Why is belonging suddenly everywhere in HR language?
Post-pandemic fragmentation, AI uncertainty, and low trust in leadership have made people hungry for stability and connection. Leaders have reached for “belonging” as a modern, acceptable way to talk about that need, but they sometimes use it as a gloss over unresolved structural problems.
How do companies get belonging wrong?
The most common mistakes are treating belonging as engagement 2.0, delegating it to HR as a project, and trying to deliver it through slogans, workshops, and events without changing underlying behaviour or systems.
What actually destroys belonging in organisations?
Poorly handled layoffs, unclear reorganisations, avoidance of difficult conversations, and leaders who act in ways that contradict their stated values are the main culprits. These experiences tell people they are expendable, which no amount of culture content can repair quickly.
What creates belonging in practice?
Belonging grows from clear expectations, honest leadership, predictable communication, accountable performance, and managers who build real relationships with their teams. It is reinforced by fair treatment, consistent standards, and recognition that links individual work to shared purpose.
Why does Gen Z care so much about belonging?
Younger workers have grown up in unstable times and are entering workplaces that feel fragile and fast changing. They are more willing to name their need for community and meaning, and they leave more quickly when those needs are obviously not being met.
How does belonging affect employer brand?
Belonging now shows up in reviews, social content, and AI summaries that candidates see long before a careers page. A gap between belonging language and lived experience becomes a reputation risk, while a close match becomes a differentiator.
Where should HR and TA leaders focus if they want to improve belonging?
Start with leadership behaviour, manager capability, and clarity around change. Align your EVP with what actually happens on the inside, and treat belonging metrics as early warning signals rather than targets to decorate.
Fathom
