When is the last time you felt "at home"?

We seriously need to rethink how we approach employee engagement and inclusivity, beyond reporting “requirements.”

What many employers have right now in terms of internal communication is critically broken, and it need not be - there is a very simple solution available to every single business, small or large, local or multinational.

I had a fascinating conversation recently with the Head of HR of a multinational FMCG. We were talking about how best to understand and include (as in really include) every employee from every business unit, to actively listen to their issues, and to bring them on a journey of “belonging.”

The conversation took a fascinating turn towards the realm of fundamentals of human psychology, and then I made a comment in reply to one of the questions; I said that that for anyone to feel really included they need to feel “at home.”

Smiling and nodding in approval, she asked me this exceptionally powerful question which, I must admit, no one has ever asked me before:

Did you ever feel at home, Ella?

Now that, to me, was a million-dollar question because it got me thinking: did I ever feel like home in any of my workplaces? Did I allow myself to be so vulnerable in the workplace and leave my guard down?

I answered to her that I felt “at home” in all my workplaces but, what I did not go on to qualify further, was that I created that “home” environment for myself, no one has bothered doing that for me or any other of my colleagues.

And this got me thinking a lot about how we approach internal communication and employee inclusivity and engagement in the workplace.

We are (or many of us are, anyway) doing it so wrong, and then we wonder why the employee attrition and turnover rates are high, and why we get bad public reviews across a variety of job recruiting sites.

How many “leaders” and managers out there understand the power and influence they have with their staff? How many understand that the most powerful “corporate engagement” and “internal communication” channel is they, themselves?

How many managers (let alone self-proclaimed “leaders”) walk the workshop/factory/open plan office floor and spend 5 seconds with their direct reports every morning, smiling at them and simply saying:

I am here for you / If there is anything you need, let me know

How many do they say it like they mean it?

I do not know about you but if I ever had a boss who looked me in the eye, smiled at me and made me believe that they are there for me and have my back, I would move mountains for them.

That is what “feeling at home” in the workplace is all about, isn’t it? It is not about proprietary intranet, flyers, WhatsApp groups or any channel per se, is it? It is about how we can harness that enormous power of genuine interpersonal communication so that it can yield a maximum output in the workplace, tying everything into the wider business objectives.

I have a very good friend and colleague, Laura Sutherland FCIPR Chart.PR FPRCA , who nailed the essence of what this is all about: “people buy from people.”

So, when we look at internal communication in an organisation, irrespective of the direction of that communication (top down or bottom up), we are – let us be perfectly honest here – looking at a psychological purchase transaction.

Therefore, if “people buy from people,” why would we ever think that an email/flier/message will suffice to really make our employees feel included, engaged and really “at home”?