Where is the last place you want to be when you feel like you don’t belong at work?

For many hospitality leaders, the “Great Resignation” has become the “Great Exasperation” as we struggle to create new incentives, offer higher wages, better benefits, and more flexibility to keep our teams and attract new talent to an industry that unlike many others doesn’t have the luxury to offer everyone hybrid and remote work.

We’re all familiar with the usual reasons workers cite for wanting to stay remote or hybrid even after lockdowns have all ended, but the preference for remote and hybrid work isn’t always about caring for kids, pets and family members. Nor is it solely about saving time, money and the environment by not commuting, having the ability to work anywhere at any time, or a desire for increased productivity and reduced stress.

There’s something missing from the conversation: belonging. When you feel like you don’t belong at work, the last place you want to be is at work.

Belonging is a fundamental human need. A lack of belonging has a negative impact on our mental health. It’s not just that we feel like we don’t belong; the experience of not belonging is similar to physical pain.

People described the feeling of being socially isolated or rejected as “feeling hurt.” And indeed, MRIs revealed that the parts of the brain that activate when we feel physical pain are the same areas that activate when we feel left out, socially isolated, or rejected. — National Academy of Sciences.

Belonging is a felt experience. You know it when you feel it and you know it when you don’t. Therefore, we have to focus on creating environments where people want to come and stay. Otherwise, they will leave or they won’t come to our industry at all.

I’m a longtime hospitality industry veteran who began working remotely in the late ’90s in a national sales capacity. Ironically, I’m an extrovert who absolutely loves people; however, on several occasions, I worked in cultures where I felt like I didn’t belong, and my well-being suffered. It was often stressful — even painful — for me to put on a happy face, be “on” all the time, and fake it ’til I made it. Often, I didn’t feel like a human being, I felt like a measurement.

With burnout, stress and mental health challenges at an all-time high, it’s physiologically exhausting to have to shape shift and try to fit in in addition to working long hours. It’s overwhelming. Therefore, working from home often feels like the best option.

Many of us choose the hospitality and events industries because we love people, we love serving, and we love connection. Yet, we would rather sacrifice our own human need of being a part of a community to mitigate the stress that accompanies going to the workplace.

When we treat a human being like they’re a human performing tasks to help us reach our goal, we fail to see the whole person. And belonging is all about being seen and accepted for who we are. We all want to be seen as our best selves, but what we really want is to be seen as ourselves.

While this list is in no way comprehensive, practicing radical hospitality that welcomes everyone to feel seen and heard starts with each one of us:

  1. Practice presence not only for others but also being present to notice our own judgments, biases and narratives that we have about ourselves, our situations or others. We can write a new story if we know the story we’ve already written.
  2. Practice curiosity by asking questions, listening and asking more questions. Curiosity is a vital way to honor individuality.
  3. Practice widening our own “mental zoom lens” to see an individual as a person not as a metric, key performance indicator or data. Remember that life is not “Top Chef” and a person isn’t the last mistake they made.
  4. Remember every interaction is with another human being. Ever sent an email on Monday morning disregarding the fact that the person on the other end may have had a weekend, too? (We’d never do that to a guest.)
  5. Go first to take the risk to be vulnerable, to speak up or share challenges, struggles and triumphs in service of others. Even having fun is taking a risk when we fear looking weird or silly.
  6. Recognize and respect differences, including different ways of thinking and processing information. Creative and divergent thinkers can help you move the needle with unique perspectives and innovative ideas.
  7. Define, learn and respect boundaries. In our overconnected world, boundaries, especially when it comes to texting and even email, is an important way to honor another human being. Some things can wait.

Sounds easy and it makes so much sense, but it takes intention, commitment and practice as we all face our own distractions, stressors and challenges.

In all industries and especially in the industries where we don’t have the luxury of giving every employee remote and flexible work options, we need to practice radical inclusion, radical empathy, radical compassion and radical self-awareness, taking responsibility to not only provide support and benefits for the well-being of employees, but to lead with behaviors aligned with our values. It may require us to rethink everything we do to put the value of the human being above the value of the human performing.

Let’s create environments where “You belong here” becomes more than a slogan but rather an experience felt by everyone.