Taking the Measure of Belonging
How do we know if the things we're designing are actually working?
In April 2020, a month into the COVID shutdown, I was onboarding a summer intern over Zoom from my dining room table. My dog was barking behind me. My three kids, suddenly stranded at home, were negotiating for space. And my organization — a San Francisco nonprofit of about a hundred people — was trying to figure out how to function in a world none of us had anticipated.
Like a lot of organizations, we had gone home in March and initially kept doing everything pretty much as we always had, only on Zoom. It quickly became clear that wasn’t going to be enough. We couldn’t simply transfer our old ways of working onto a screen. We needed to intentionally redesign how people would experience connection, support and collaboration while we were apart.
So we created a Connection Team made up of colleagues at every level of the organization to lead new strategies for working together and supporting each other during two years of remote work.
Before we started planning anything, we defined the outcomes we hoped to achieve, landing on three goals:
Our colleagues feel they matter.
They are supported to do their best work.
They are committed to the organization and our shared mission.
Those goals became the foundation for everything that followed.
Goals Drive Design
When organizations think about measurement, they often focus on what happens at the end: We do the work, then we collect some data to find out whether it succeeded.
But good measurement starts much earlier.
First, we have to be clear about the human outcomes we're trying to create. How do we want people to feel? What do we want them to experience? What do we hope they will do differently as a result?
Those goals become design guideposts.
If we want people to feel that they matter, what would we need to build into the culture so that people are known, noticed and valued?
If we want them to feel supported, how do we create relationships and structures that make it easy to ask for and offer help?
If we want people to feel committed, what opportunities do they have to contribute, take responsibility, make decisions and shape what happens?
Now we can design strategies and practices intended to produce those outcomes. And then we can pay attention to whether they do. So the cycle looks like this:
Define the outcomes
Design for them
Try things
Measure what changes
Learn and redesign
That's how something as seemingly intangible as belonging becomes actionable.
What Are We Actually Measuring?
One of the challenges with measuring belonging is that belonging itself is a big, abstract idea.
In fact, when we measure belonging, we don't usually ask people, Do you feel like you belong?
Instead, we get more concrete. What would we expect people to experience if they felt a strong sense of belonging? They might feel known and valued. Accepted as their full selves. Supported by others. Comfortable speaking up. Connected through meaningful relationships.
And what might they do? They might participate, contribute an idea or some of their time, take on a leadership role, help someone else, or take responsibility for something that matters to the whole community.
Those give us two broad kinds of evidence to look for: what people say they experience and what people actually do.
This is quite different from measuring satisfaction. Satisfaction asks essentially consumer questions: Did you get what you came for? Were you happy with what we provided? Those questions may tell us something useful, but relying on them also reinforces a customer dynamic, treating people as recipients of what an organization provides.
Belonging asks us to look for something different: Are people becoming more connected to one another and more invested in the whole? Are they moving from consumption to participation to contribution to ownership?
With the Connection Team, we asked staff periodically how supported, visible and connected they felt, and how those experiences affected their work. But we also looked for evidence in behavior.
Were people participating actively at work? Showing up for Lunch and Learns? Joining the buddy system? Contributing to the employee giving circle? Bringing forward ideas? Taking responsibility for creating connection themselves?
One of my favorite indicators came about a year into the work. The original members of the Connection Team were ready to step back — and other colleagues volunteered to take their places.
They chose to take responsibility for sustaining something that mattered to the community.
That's an important marker of belonging: the movement from participation to contribution to ownership.
Measurement Helps us See Where to Design Next
I'm working now with a congregation that has made belonging a long-term organizational priority. Together, we identified outcomes they hope to create: more people feeling known and valued; more people participating, contributing and leading; stronger relationships; greater shared responsibility for the community; and ultimately, stronger retention and active engagement.
They decided to look at those outcomes in several ways. An annual survey asks people about their actual experiences — whether they feel known and valued, accepted as their full selves, supported by others, comfortable voicing concerns, connected through meaningful relationships, and proud to be part of the community.
And they are looking at behavioral data too: participation in groups, repeat attendance, giving and member retention.
The first survey reported high levels of pride and feeling accepted — encouraging evidence that important parts of the culture are working. But contribution was the lowest-scoring measure. Newer members reported weaker relationships and contribution than people who had been there longer.
The survey data gave them something more useful than a score. It raised questions that are helping the congregation focus its belonging work more effectively.
Questions like: How might we make it easier for someone new to move from showing up to forming relationships and contributing? How might we create more pathways for people who already care deeply about the community to take meaningful responsibility for it?
Measurement doesn't simply tell us whether we're succeeding. It helps us see where to design next.
Measurement Doesn't Have to be Complicated
The congregation I described chose to build a fairly robust measurement system because belonging is a long-term organizational priority. Most of us don't need to do that every time we try something new.
Measurement can be as simple as paying attention to what changes. Are new people participating? Are different voices being heard? Are people taking more initiative or responsibility? Are relationships forming that weren't there before?
The point isn't to measure everything. It's to know what we're trying to change, design intentionally toward those outcomes, and then pay attention to whether we're seeing evidence that it's working.
Sometimes that evidence will be quantitative. Sometimes it will come from asking people directly about their experience. And sometimes it will simply be patterns we can observe.
Measurement isn't only about proving that the work succeeded. It helps us do the work better. With our Connection Team, we changed strategies more than once when we identified gaps that needed addressing.
That's the learning loop: We tried this. What happened? What are we noticing? What should we keep, change or try next?
An Invitation
So here's a question to bring back to your own organization or community:
Think about one group you care about. Six months from now, how would you want people in that group to feel differently, behave differently, or relate to one another differently?
Name those outcomes. Then ask:
What would we need to design differently to make them possible — and how will we know when we've been successful?
I'd love to hear what you come up with. Reply here or reach out directly. And if this resonates with someone you know, please pass it along.