Designing for Belonging + Workplace Well-Being

Legendary management consultant Peter Drucker once wrote: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." Drucker didn't mean a company's strategy was unimportant — far from it. Rather, that a powerful and empowering company culture was a surer route to business success.

This quote has always resonated with me because: 1). I believe a strong company culture is a need to have, not a nice to have, not just for business success but for employee happiness and well-being, and 2.) I love breakfast.

I often compare workplace experience's role in building and maintaining a thriving company culture to gardening. It's never done and needs constant tending. Conditions are always changing. A gardener needs to pay attention to the health and well-being of individual plants and that of the garden as a whole and adapt tactics accordingly.

In addition to using the gardening metaphor, as a workplace experience designer, I use frameworks like Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs to describe the role's accountabilities. The fundamental premise of the psychological theory is that once a person's basic physiological needs are met (food, water, shelter, physical safety, etc.), they're motivated by non-materialistic needs such as social status, achievement, and creativity.

As a workplace experience designer, I'm laser-focused on the three foundational layers of the pyramid. I ensure people's basic PHYSICAL workplace needs are met, create PSYCHOLOGICAL conditions that make them feel safe to fail and explore and design community moments of CONNECTION and BELONGING. Once these basic needs are met, employees can ladder up to finding PURPOSE and MEANING in their work (the top two layers of the pyramid).

Another, more recent framework I love is the Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being from the U.S. Surgeon General. Like rituals, mental health was a topic workplaces used to reserve for private HR conversations, but the COVID pandemic, combined with Gen Zers entering the workforce in greater numbers, brought the importance of mental health and workplace well-being front and center and I couldn't be happier.

Click on the photos below to learn more of my thoughts on belonging and well-being at work.