Jim Bagnola, executive coach: “Employees who feel they belong take 75 percent fewer sick days”

“Belonging is an emotion, it’s a feeling. It has little to do with intellect but it is so important that I always wonder in the discoveries of management. Isn’t that common sense? And then I realize common sense isn’t common practice. Common sense isn’t so common. We had to review this kinds of concepts so the first thing I did was to look at current research. The current research on belonging came from Harvard Business Review and they call it the Belonging Barometer Study. Here are some results.

Fostering belonging can lead to 50 percent lower risk of turnover. We lose good people if they don’t have the sense of belonging,” Jim Bagnola, International Speaker, Executive Coach and Corporate Educator, HPDI, said during “Belonging at Work Conference” powered by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“Employees who feel they belong take 75 percent fewer sick days. That saves us money. Long-term team members come to work and are productive. If they are more productive that can impact in a major way on our revenue.

Job performance increases by 56 percent if I feel I belong. This can translate, depending on the size of the company, into millions of dollars if you are a large company.

I’d like to talk about some of my experience with belonging with clients and partners. One of the exercises that we did just before covid together was called ‘the appreciate exercise’. One of the things that create belonging is appreciation.

What we did is we had maybe 10 people on the team together and we took one person at the time. We started with the founder and everyone around the room said what they appreciate about him. Each person had one-two things to say about what they appreciated about him. Then we go to the second person. By the third or fourth person, one of the team members said: “Is anyone feel like crying?” By the end of it all of us cried. It touched the heart, and it really makes people feel belonging.

If you are the manager, you would hold an appreciation session maybe every two weeks. People don’t realize why they are appreciated until they are told.

If you are the manager, you can have one-on-one meetings to check-in with people once a month.

Google did a piece of research on what makes teams more successful. They found two things: psychological safety and everybody gets to speak.”

Click here for the event recording.