On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Brigit Ritchie, Co-Founder and CEO of WE. Brigit has spent more than a decade facilitating personal and professional development for women and now co-ed groups across companies including Google, Instagram, and lululemon. Her practice, Relational Mindfulness, was built around a single observation: most workplace programs assume relationships are a byproduct of being in the same room, when in fact they require their own deliberate craft.
Brigit argued that companies overinvest in event-based connection and underinvest in the relational skills that let connection compound. The team offsite, the all-hands, the volunteer day. All useful inputs. None of them, on their own, change the daily quality of how colleagues relate. The harder work, in her view, is teaching people how to ask different questions, how to listen without staging the next response, and how to repair small ruptures before they grow into resignations.
That conversation lands hard right now because most companies are watching engagement and belonging scores soften, and the standard playbook of more events is not moving the numbers. The shift Brigit pointed to is from connection as activity to connection as practice.
Why Belonging Is Slipping Even at Companies That Care
The data on belonging keeps tightening. BetterUp research on workplace belonging finds that employees with a high sense of belonging take 75 percent fewer sick days and show a 56 percent increase in job performance, while excluded employees have a 50 percent higher turnover rate. The cost of low belonging is roughly 10 million dollars annually for every 10,000 employees. The financial case is severe.
The harder finding is that belonging is not slipping at companies that ignore it. Belonging is slipping at companies that have invested heavily and still cannot move the metric. The reason is usually that the investment was in events instead of skills. Events build temporary connection. Skills build durable relationships. Most workplaces still confuse the two.
The companies starting to move belonging metrics again are doing two things differently. They are training managers in relational skills with the same rigor they train technical skills. And they are setting up always-on listening so they can spot the relational ruptures that erode belonging silently between annual surveys.
What Relational Mindfulness Looks Like at Work
What is relational mindfulness in practical terms?
It is the practice of staying present in interactions with the goal of understanding the other person, not winning the conversation. In a workplace context that translates to specific behaviors: open-ended questions, slower response cadences, naming what you notice instead of interpreting it, and explicit checks for whether you have understood what someone meant.
How is this different from active listening training?
Active listening trains the surface behaviors. Relational mindfulness trains the underlying attention. The two reinforce each other, but they are not the same. A manager can do textbook active listening and still feel transactional to a report. The difference is whether the manager is actually present, and that is what mindfulness practice builds.
What Actually Works: A Framework for Building Workplace Relationships
Design principle one: train relational skills the same way you train technical skills
Treat one-on-one quality, feedback delivery, and conflict repair as professional skills with progression paths. Run cohort-based programs with practice and coaching. Pair training with manager assessment so the skills get reinforced in operating rhythms.
Design principle two: instrument relationships, not just engagement
Engagement scores are aggregate. Relational data is granular. Use pulse surveys to track items like manager attentiveness, peer trust, and meeting effectiveness. Pair pulses with employee surveys to ground trends in deeper analysis. The combination lets you spot relational drift months before retention does.
Design principle three: build small repair rituals into the operating system
Most relational damage at work is not catastrophic. It is small ruptures that never get repaired. A retro that ends without naming what was hard. A tense one-on-one that gets followed by polite silence. Companies that normalize quick repair conversations, with light structure, see belonging metrics hold up under stress that breaks other companies.
Where Employee Relations Fits
The strongest indicator of healthy company culture is what happens when a relationship at work goes wrong. Companies with strong intake, clear triage, and visible follow-through give employees a path that protects relationships instead of forcing escalation. Companies without that path push every minor friction into a binary choice between silence and grievance, and most employees pick silence.
How does ER infrastructure protect belonging?
When employees know there is a confidential channel for the small concerns that fall short of formal complaints, they keep talking. The data flowing through that channel becomes early-warning intelligence for managers and leaders, and the underlying signal is preserved employee engagement. Strong relational practices at work improve organizational culture by giving leaders the data they need to act early, including improvements to employee onboarding and other key relational moments.
Frequently Asked Questions About Workplace Belonging
What is the difference between engagement and belonging?
Engagement measures effort and motivation. Belonging measures whether someone feels they fit and matter. Engagement can be high in a high-performing team where one person feels invisible. Belonging is the more sensitive metric for the lived experience of work.
How often should we measure belonging?
Two to four times a year for trended scores, plus continuous intake for the relational moments that surveys cannot capture. The rhythm matters more than any single channel. The goal is to catch drift before it becomes attrition.
What can managers do this week to improve belonging?
Three things. Open one-on-ones with a question that has nothing to do with the work. Close one-on-ones by asking what they want you to know that you did not ask about. And follow up on a personal detail from the previous conversation. None of these costs anything. All of them compound.
How do we build belonging in remote and hybrid teams?
Treat connection as a discipline, not a byproduct. Schedule short, structured peer one-on-ones across teams. Run async rituals that surface non-work context. Make manager attentiveness measurable. Improving the workplace blog post on improving the culture of listening covers more concrete moves.
What is the single biggest blocker to workplace belonging?
Manager attentiveness. Most belonging programs underinvest in the manager-employee relationship and overinvest in company-wide events. Reverse that ratio and most belonging metrics start to move within two cycles.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Brigit's framing is a useful corrective for any HR team that has run the standard belonging playbook and watched the scores stagnate. The work is not bigger events. The work is better relationships, and that requires teaching specific skills and measuring specific moments.
The companies that take this seriously look quieter from the outside. They are not running splashy belonging campaigns. They are running tighter listening loops, training managers on relational skills, and giving employees a confidential way to flag what is not working. The result, two years in, is that belonging metrics hold up against the macro pressures that pull most companies down.
That is what relational mindfulness looks like inside an operating model.
See how AllVoices helps HR teams build the listening infrastructure that belonging work depends on.
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