(Un)belonging at work: an overlooked ingredient of workplace health

Abstract

Organizations offer activities and programmes to improve their employees’ health. These workplace health promotion (WHP) activities usually have an individualized and top-down focus, a low uptake among employees, and are perceived to be out of line with employees’ experiences and definitions of health. This paper follows up on studies that have broadened the focus of WHP by including social relations and delves deeper into how daily practices and experiences of (un)belonging at work relate to workplace health. Based on ethnographic research in two companies in the Netherlands, this paper analyses how (un)belonging is expressed and experienced by employees. The paper shows that employees define health at work as a social practice. It also demonstrates how dynamics at work shape different dimensions of (un)belonging that, in turn, affect employees’ perceived health at work. These findings indicate the importance of including (un)belonging in the workplace as an ingredient of WHP.

Contribution to Health Promotion.

• A sense of belonging to the organization or team is more important for employees’ health at work than addressing life style issues.

• To create a sense of belonging it is important that employees feel appreciated by managers and that their expertise is used in decision-making.

• It is vital for health promotion at work that activities are shaped and developed with the employees instead of for the employees.

INTRODUCTION

Traditional workplace health promotion (WHP) mainly focuses on healthy food, physical activity and smoking cessation (Shain and Kramer, 2004), which have little to do with the work environment and the work tasks. As argued by Täuber (Täuber, 2018, p. 12), such a health promotion programme can be moralizing in that it ‘undermines social cohesion by creating a divide between those conforming to and those deviating from the health norm’. Top-down developed WHP interventions tend to have a low uptake among employees, as activities are added to the work tasks instead of being integrated into daily work routines and are suspected to be only in the company’s interests (Nöhammer et al., 2014; Robroek et al., 2021; Zoller et al., 2022). Similar to other forms of health promotion, WHP programmes frame WHP as an individual responsibility (Crawford, 1980; Chau et al., 2019).

Within WHP research, few scholars acknowledge that workplaces should not be considered as mere aggregates of self-managing individual employees. Eakin and MacEachen’s qualitative study (Eakin and MacEachen, 1998) of small enterprises stresses that social relations, such as the existence of strained authority relations, influence whether employees feel healthy or injured. Gunnarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir (Gunnarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir, 2003) compared the experiences of well-being and opportunities to improve health among employees working in the laundry room and kitchen of a hospital. Although the working conditions in the two departments were similar, they have shown that cohesiveness at work is key for the experienced well-being at work. Their study acknowledges ‘that positive and supportive work relationships foster experiences of self-worth and belonging and are essential for channelling suggestions for improvements in the work environment’ (ibid, p. 72). Based on these findings, Gunnarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir prioritize human relations at work above individual health behaviour measures, explicitly mentioning belonging as a key prerequisite for workplace health (ibid).

The pandemic made clear how important the feeling of belonging to a group of co-workers can be for employees’ well-being while doing their work from home and how it supported them in dealing with pandemic challenges like home schooling and digital communication (Allgood et al., 2022). A lack of belonging, however, often resulted in feelings of displacement, insecurity and stress. Although the value of belonging is increasingly acknowledged, it remains unclear what it exactly entails within dynamics at the workplace and how belonging is experienced (or not) in relation to health at work. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork in two companies, this paper will shed light on the relations between work, health and belonging.

Belonging and health

To Hagerty et al. (Hagerty et al., 1992) belonging has two fundamental characteristics: being valued, needed or important for others or in a specific context and the feeling of fitting in through shared or complementary features. People experience belonging when they ‘feel themselves to be an integral part of [a] system or environment’ (p. 173). The feeling to be an integral part of a family, group of friends, community or a workplace has the potential to foster or, when absent, to impact our perceived health. Psychologists Baumeister and Leary (Baumeister and Leary, 1995, p. 520) state that belongingness is a human need instead of merely a want:

Both psychological and physical health problems are more common among people who lack social attachments. (…) belongingness is not only pleasant but also apparently very beneficial to the individual in multiple ways.

Neuro-imaging research has demonstrated that social exclusion, or unbelonging, is registered by the brain as a physical injury (Eisenberger et al., 2003), while Mattes and Lang (Mattes and Lang, 2021, p. 9) acknowledge belonging as an important source of psychological and social resilience. Beyond this physical/psychological dimension of belonging, scholars have pointed to its political and spatio-material dimensions. Yuval-Davis (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 204) for instance recognizes the political dimensions of belonging that construct, claim, justify or resist forms of socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion. People often express feelings of belonging in relation to communities that are imagined to be rooted in a particular place (a nation, a region, a neighbourhood) or by making use of material symbols (flags, clothing, make-up). This paper follows Mattes and Lang (Mattes and Lang, 2021) by appreciating the mutual implications and connectedness of the different dimensions of belonging and its importance to health. In order to understand how belonging impacts the realm of work, we need to turn to other scholars.

Belonging at work

Organizational studies have looked at belonging at work from different perspectives, yet the impact on health remains untouched. The political dimension aligns with Hagerty et al.’s (Hagerty et al., 1992) fundamental characteristics of belonging: being valued, needed or important to others and the feeling to fit in. McClure and Brown (McClure and Brown, 2008, p. 10) found six constituents of workplace (un)belonging that could fall in these characteristics: being invited and learning to be part of a workplace; connecting with colleagues and wanting to be included; doing work and being recognized; natural selection, competing, being excluded and not belonging; being needed and feeling deeply involved in the work; and reflecting on the passing of time, work and people. In their study involving teleworkers, Belle et al. (Belle et al., 2015) show that stimulating organizational dynamics are important even when employees work from home. Their participants stress the importance of organizational identification, the desire to be included and demonstrations of communal qualities, such as empathy, care for one another and self-sacrifice (p. 88). Such organizational dynamics augment recognizing people’s talents, interests and experiences, as well as finding acceptance of their self-expression of these aspects. Here, too, it is vital to be valued, needed and important to others and to feel you fit in.

Besides the dimension of organizational belonging, the spatio-material dimension plays a role at work, as shown by the study of Filstad et al. (Filstad et al., 2019). They analysed photos on ingredients of belonging for employees. These photos capture the value of social interactions (coffee breaks), materiality (building, desk decorations, important objects for work routines), emotions (laughing colleagues) and aesthetics (anonymous buildings and empty corridors). The authors find that belonging is defined as a process of becoming part of something larger; as experiencing physical and symbolic boundaries at work; and as performing, engaging and participating in a workplace (pp. 128–129).

To our knowledge, the physical/psychological dimension of belonging, acknowledged by Mattes and Lang (Mattes and Lang, 2021) as mutually connected to the organizational and spatio-material dimensions of belonging, seems to be lacking within the realm of work. Besides Eakin and MacEachen’s (Eakin and MacEachen, 1998) and Gunnarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir’s (Gunnarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir, 2003) research, little is known about the exact relations between these dimensions of belonging at work and their impact on perceived workplace health. We aim to fill this gap by bringing along these theoretical underpinnings in our focus on workplace health to study how the three dimensions of belonging connect within the workplace and impact health. In the following, we first detail the research settings and methods. Next, our findings demonstrate how workplace health is experienced and produced as a social practice and show how this is closely intertwined with physical/psychological, organizational and spatio-material dimensions of belonging. The discussion reflects on the importance to understand (un)belonging as a workplace health issue and what implications this has for WHP research and practice.

RESEARCH SETTINGS

In order to develop new approaches to WHP that include companies’ specific work settings and attune to the life worlds of employees, the first two authors carried out ethnographic-participatory fieldwork in two companies in the Netherlands. Three qualitative pilot studies in both companies showed that many employees valued their health and were interested in it, yet few participated in activities (Breugelmans, 2017; Schroeten, 2017; Van Aert, 2018).

The first setting is an industrial production company with (at the time of the fieldwork) 150 employees, of whom 50 worked as factory operators in five shifts (day and night), and the rest worked in daytime in departments such as maintenance, quality control, HR, HSE, sales and logistics. In 2015, the company introduced a vitality programme, covering a range of activities, such as trainings by a vitality coach, fitness, smoking cessation support, offering fruit in the workplace and workshops on mental health, nutrition and sleeping. The organized activities were mainly attended by employees working in daytime departments rather than those working in day and night shifts.

The second setting is a social workplace company. At the time of the fieldwork, the social workplace had ~1200 employees, of whom 100 were ‘regular’, while the others had limited prospects for entry to the regular labour market, due to various kinds of disabilities and/or ailments. They obtain support and guidance to find work and on-the-job training in order to use their capacities and talents within the company or to second them to other companies. Employees perform a broad variety of tasks in different divisions: assembly and packing tasks, wheel assemblage, basic administrative tasks, cleaning and services such as public gardening. Over the last few years, the social workplace offered health promotion activities to its employees, including health checks, smoking cessation programmes, diet workshops, subsidized fitness and a bicycle plan, yet not many employees were aware of the activities’ existence.

The nature of each setting (industrial production company and social workplace) and the primary production processes influenced work hierarchies, regulations (i.e. safety, general conduct) and interaction between colleagues and departments. Yet, our analysis demonstrates that dimensions of belonging have a similar impact on how the employees of both companies experience their health at work.

METHOD

This paper draws on ethnographic-participatory fieldwork between November 2018 and January 2020.

Through participant observation, we learned about employees’ conceptions of health at work. We did so by having informal conversations and blending in as much as we could, for instance, by joining field operators on their factory tours, having lunchbreaks at the reserved table for the social workplace division, and attending work division meetings, safety instruction briefings and information sessions. By being in the companies regularly, we started earning the employees’ trust while observing daily routines and work tasks, engaging in small talk and taking time to listen to them about topics that they wanted to discuss or tell us. After some time, we were increasingly perceived by the employees as insiders to some extent because we wore similar clothes (in the industrial production company) and obeyed the same working times and rules (in the social workplace). As trusted outsiders we were able to collect ‘thicker’ and contextualized insights than a one-off interview would have provided: we observed particular ‘unsafe’ situations, witnessed high heated conversations on the work floor and were able to see events within a larger context and timeline. The informed consent process was part of the entire fieldwork period and continued as an ongoing dialogue and negotiation with the research participants, echoing the American Anthropological Association’s (American Anthropological Association, 2012) definition of informed consent.

In total, we visited the industrial company 48 times and the social workplace 66 times, both with an estimated average of 3 h per visit. The different amounts of visits is justified by the fact that building trust and relations took more time in the social workplace than it did in the industrial company. The social workplace demanded more time and attention to obtain a comprehensive overview of the organization. We believe that the interviews in the industrial production company has balanced this. Additionally, we held 25 qualitative interviews (12 in the industrial production company, 13 in the social workplace) with managers, supervisors and occupational physicians. These interviews enabled comparing and verifying our understanding of the conceptions of work and health we observed in the context of each company. During and directly after fieldwork, we wrote elaborate notes in a shared document, while interviews were recorded and transcribed.

After field visits, we debriefed and compared our observations and wrote field notes in a shared document that indicated each fieldworker’s perspective. Field notes and preliminary analyses were discussed with the other two co-authors, who had more distance to the settings. As pointed out by Ybema et al. (Ybema et al., 2009, pp. 154, 162), this helped us to literally ‘break out’ and to gain physical and theoretical distance to the companies enhancing the analysis of our data. Inspired by grounded theory principles, we read field notes and interview transcripts multiple times while writing open codes to highlight important and recurrent themes. These codes were collected in a shared document to enable the axial coding in which the themes were grouped. Discussing these themes together enabled developing conceptual frameworks related to the dominant themes of the analysis: occupational health and safety, the social practices of safety, the role of social relations on perceived health at work, the dimensions of belonging at work, the role of recognition for local expertise, and the process of involving employees and developing activities. In this paper, we only focus on the social dimensions of workplace health and left out the analysis of occupational health and safety. Theoretical insights from theories of belonging helped us to get an in-depth understanding of the relevance of these social dimensions for health and well-being. Within this broader code ‘dimensions of belonging’ we identified patterns between and within sub-codes such as the role of social relations on perceived health at work, the role of recognition for local expertise and the participatory process of developing workplace health activities. In this way, we are able to appreciate how different dimensions of belonging were produced and impacting how employees felt at work in both settings. In the following, we will discussed the identified patterns, illustrated by exemplary quotes. The study obtained ethical clearance from the Ethics Review Committee Health, Medicine and Life Sciences (FMHL-REC) of Maastricht University, registering code: FHML-REC/2019/BierThis.

RESULTS

Physical/psychological dimensions of belonging and workplace health

When we asked employees about ‘work and health’, many associated this with individual health and measures, such as healthy food intake and physical activity, thereby reproducing the individualized discourse on health. However, while spending time on the work floor, we observed and learned that daily workplace dynamics in relation to employees’ health were more nuanced.

Managing health together at the industrial production company

Some employees at the industrial production company expressed their frustrations related to overall job satisfaction and the work atmosphere:

You need more than fruit alone; that’s not what people need. Better yet, you need to start on the other side: that people feel part of the company and that they find it normal to partake in parties and activities. (interview)

Referring to the company’s vitality programme, another employee remarked: ‘vitality is when the team members, among themselves, accommodate a colleague suffering from migraines’ (field notes). These quotes show that workplace health is seen as a social practice that relates to the feeling of being part of the company and of a team whose members help one another. We observed that the teams in the production shifts were close-knit groups, where colleagues knew about their private lives and peculiarities:

Mitchell hastily enters the control room with his leather bag in hand. ‘Oh my, there he is, the professor’, another operator remarks to us. Mitchell introduces himself and tells us that his colleagues call him that because his head never stops thinking and he always engages in discussions. Before and after every shift, he bikes half an hour to work to be physically active and, most importantly, to clear his head and to digest everything that happened at work. Mitchell tells that Hank and he always work as a desk–field operator pair. They have arranged a clear task division, which aligns with their personalities and capabilities. Being the busy and vivacious one, Mitchell works best as a field operator in the factory, while Hank, the calm and organized one, is an excellent desk operator. Mitchell gets tired and cold behind the desk and finds the work too stressful. Checking the computer, telephone, helping the truck drivers—sometimes he just cannot handle all of that. Hank can, and he keeps Mitchell on track via the transceiver. (Field notes)

The vignette shows how two colleagues, with specific characteristics and preferences, adjust their work tasks between them, enabling durable work rhythms. Across the five shift-teams, we observed how these kinds of relations and rhythms were arranged over the years. The vignette exemplifies how belonging to a team that cares for each other and allows flexibility and autonomy to divide and adjust tasks in line with employees’ skills, qualities and characteristics, may foster workplace health. If Mitchell would have been obliged to work as a desk operator, his (mental) health would likely have been impaired.

At the time of fieldwork, the company started a pilot introducing a schedule where the operators could plan their own work shifts according to their preferences. This differed from the fixed schedule in which the five shifts followed the same structure every year. In case of holidays or other events, the operators could switch within or outside their own group. The flexible schedule would disrupt the structure of five shifts, meaning that the operators would no longer work in the fixed teams that existed almost 10 years. HR introduced the pilot as a vitality measure as it would allow operators to minimize working at night when having troubles with that. Although some operators acknowledged that the flexible schedule would allow more flexibility in planning their private lives, many operators strongly resisted the pilot, partly because the understanding of ‘health’ behind flexible scheduling did not align with their own understanding:

What is healthy for me? Is that the morning, afternoon, or night shift? I am exhausted after a morning shift; is that healthy? I don’t mind the nights, so in the flexible schedule, I will probably work more night shifts than morning shifts; is that healthy? (field notes)

Another concern was that in the flexible schedule, the operators would work in different teams each shift instead of in fixed teams, impeding team building and, as an operator put it, ‘undermining the bit of team spirit that we have’ (field notes). Following up on his story about working with Hank, Mitchell commented on the flexible schedule:

I think it is a pity when the flexible schedule pilot tears apart the fixed teams because Hank and I have been attuned to each other for almost ten years! But I also understand that it is good if you are able to work with everyone. (field notes)

Mitchell’s concern about the team spirit among the operators resonated with a shift leader’s view on how to manage 50 operators instead of ten in the fixed schedule:

Now, I know the home situation of my team so that I can adjust to that and take it into account in the daily work. How should I know that in the flexible schedule? We are with 50 operators in total; I simply cannot know how all of them feel. (field notes)

In contrast to WHP’s conception of individual health management, the preceding quote shows that workplace health is also about a shift leader checking in with his team members and knowing how they feel. An employee described the situation in the company as follows: ‘We have a shared goal, and that’s production and earning money for our shareholders. But we can only do that when we are happy’ (field notes). Managing health at work is thus not just an individual matter; it is a social practice—comprising how team members work together, care for one another and managers that know how their team members feel. These are dynamics at work that shape the physical/psychological dimension of belonging in that the feeling to belong to a team and/or organization, of the lack therefore, may foster or impair employees’ happiness, health and well-being.

Signalling each other’s conditions and balancing energy levels at the social workplace

In the mailing and packaging division of the social workplace, most employees initially told us that they knew what they ‘should’ do in general for their individual health. As time went by, the employees discussed health at work in a broader sense. In the production hall, we observed the vital role that colleagues played in signalling one another’s condition at a particular moment, such as feeling stressed or anxious. An employee pointed out that he and the colleagues who sat next to him were able to read one another’s emotions and signal when they had to give one another some peace and quiet—something they all valued highly (field notes). We witnessed several times how the employees explained a colleague’s silence, frustration or absence to us, offered advice on how to approach a colleague, or warned us not to talk to a colleague: ‘Let her be; just leave her alone today’ (field notes).

During a training session for supervisors to signal stress in the work force, the trainers asked a supervisor to reflect on the aspects that boosted his own energy at work. In his speech, he summarized the main aspects:

the value of good collaboration with the team, a nice atmosphere with employees and colleagues, belonging, achieving results with a small work force, supporting employees in their personal development, freedom to make your work schedule, recognition (supervisor’s speech).

The supervisor shared with the group that this did not mean that his batteries were always charged; there were moments that drained his energy, too. Nonetheless, he pointed out: ‘employees and colleagues are important to discuss irritations then as well, to have coffee and to buckle down and start over’ (supervisor’s speech). According to him, colleagues should cope with aspects that drain energy together, so they could keep their batteries charged. This speech illustrates the role that colleagues play in workplace health by creating a safe atmosphere where employees can be vulnerable toward each other and consider one another’s situations, thereby reducing of preventing stress or other health risks. We have observed this not only among production employees, but also among employees working at higher levels of the social workplace.

In both companies we observed that, at all levels of both companies, employees perceive workplace health as something you aim for together. It is a social practice that requires continuous maintenance, such as taking over tasks when a colleague is unable to perform them, signalling one another’s condition, feeling to be understood by colleagues and supervisors, and the satisfaction in pulling off a task together and reaching a goal. This maintenance work fosters a sense of belonging to (parts of) a company or a group of colleagues that produce buffers against physical/psychological risk factors at work. The physical/psychological dimension of belonging thus seems to have a positive influence on workplace health.

Organizational and spatial-material dimensions of belonging and workplace health

Our analysis clearly demonstrates that employees connect workplace health to the physical/psychological dimension of belonging. The relationship with organizational and spatio-material dimensions of belonging was less explicitly mentioned. However, we observed a strong relationship between the different dimensions of belonging.

(Un)belonging to the industrial production company

Employees of the industrial production company shared that the company’s divisions and departments all comprised different atmospheres which they commonly referred to as the different islands of the company. These islands were divided between the departments working in and around the factory, on one hand, and those working in the office buildings, on the other hand. The atmosphere on the islands was generally considered good. However, the connection between departments was experienced to be lacking, as an employee observed: ‘In earlier times, departments were more one, whereas now, people work for the success of each department, not so much for the whole company’ (field notes). The perceived island structure also impacted the mutual understanding for working conditions, like the understanding of office workers for the dangerous tasks operators perform:

Let them [from the office] walk along during shitty tasks in the heat, while wearing these combat suits. Here, we are always in the danger angle; nothing will happen to them. With this heat, they have air conditioning and call the canteen lady to bring them something to drink (field notes).

The island structure of the industrial production company resembles what Hsiao et al. (Hsiao et al., 2017) have called organizational distance to describe ‘the degree to which alliance members are similar or dissimilar in terms of demographic characteristics, such as business practices, operational mechanisms, corporate culture, and management style’ (p. 639). In the industrial production company this meant that, although working in a good and supportive atmosphere within departments, employees experienced a large organizational distance between departments had to do with a lack of understanding.

Considering ways to reduce the organizational distance, some employees suggested internal exchanges between departments to bridge the islands and to increase the mutual understanding:

Exchanges between planning and production would be good for the planning colleagues. Then they would notice that switching to the production of another product in the factory requires more than just pushing a button for us operators. It takes 10 to 11 hours to start a new product because the machines should be cleaned before we can actually switch. (field notes)

In turn, the planning department accused the production department of being ignorant:

Production does not know how much time it takes us to hunt down mistakes they make [like tagging and registering a product correctly in the system] and then correct them. If we call them to clear something up, you hear them think: ‘there they go again, those naggers.’ Yet planning is always in the middle. We have to take into account what is going on in production and then synchronize with internal logistics, customer service, and truck drivers, while the laboratory also has to do the analyses of products before these can be shipped. It would be good to show operators that it is simply impossible for us to plan longer runs of one product in the factory. (field notes)

Similar frustrations and accusations were expressed by the mechanics at the maintenance department who felt their expertise and knowledge of the factories were not consulted by the engineering department:

I recognize that it demotivates me and makes me impassive that my knowledge is not used by engineering, despite the fact that we work here every day. (field notes)

This example explicitly underlines the connection between being valued or needed (in making decisions, improvements and innovations in work processes) and organizational belonging. Moreover, the examples shows how a lack of organizational belonging might impair one’s perceived health at work, as the mechanic feels demotivated and impassive. After an incident with hot water bursting out of a pipeline, the Health, Safety and Environment officer reduced the water temperature in a factory. An operator commented:

I have the impression that everything gets decided from behind the desk, like reducing the water temperature. We know that you cannot clean the chemicals of that specific factory with cold water. A structural solution is missing. It’s panic stations. (field notes)

Increased visits from the offices to the factory would enhance the understanding of the nature of factory work: if the Health, Safety and Environment officer had consulted the operators, she would have known that hot water was required in this particular part of the factory.

The large organizational distance that catalyses the lack of organizational belonging can be partially explained by the actual spatial distances between departments in the industrial production company. The production departments and the office departments were located in separate buildings, taking a few minutes to reach by foot. The spatial division between the factory and the office was materialized through the use of personal protection equipment, which was perceived as irregular for office employees:

Having changed into our suits and protection materials, we leave the dressing room and walk towards the factory while enjoying the sun on our faces after some harsh winter days. The maintenance supervisor steps out of the workshop and says, ‘It’s technical weather, right?’ We are puzzled. He explains, ‘During the first nice days after wintertime, the people from the offices suddenly visit the factory to get out and get some sun. Just like parakeets, they wear yellow safety jackets. And they suddenly want to see all kinds of things, like tourists.’ (field notes)

The vignette shows how factory employees perceive the visits by office employees on sunny days—it’s only in nice weather that office employees are bothered to visit the factory. It reflects the general impression of office employees and factory employees that each group is distant from the work of the other and that they do not recognize each other’s work, conditions and expertise.

These empirical examples suggest that the aspects of organizational belonging, being valued and feeling to fit in, were not met on the company-wide level of the industrial production company. Moreover, the lack of organizational belonging seem to be fuelled by and expressed through spatio-material dimensions of belonging. In line with Baumeister and Leary (Baumeister and Leary, 1995), we have shown how the unfulfillment of the human desire to be an integral part of an organization led to feelings of frustration, stress, demotivation and impassiveness among employees of the industrial production company, which negatively impacted perceived workplace health.

(Un)belonging to the social workplace

In the social workplace, similar to the other company, being valued, feelings to fit and large organizational distance were also mentioned to impact organizational belonging and workplace health. An employee shared that he only experienced appreciation from direct colleagues and got sincere compliments from the supervisor. However, the group leaders, who supervised the daily execution of tasks, did not show much appreciation, except for a thumbs-up or a quick ‘Well done!’ This disappointed him: ‘a compliment would be good for your frame of mind’ (field notes), showing how being valued impacts one’s perceived health. When asked about his experiences with managers higher-up, he claimed that apart from the HR manager who visited the production halls every week, he did not feel recognized by supervisors from ‘way above’:

Sometimes, the board comes to the work floor to peek at us monkeys [in Dutch: aapjes kijken]. They come here with posh ladies or new clients to look at us. They then gather around you with their hands on their back, looking over your shoulder while not saying a word. I don’t like that. (field notes)

The employee’s dislike of being ‘peeked at [as] monkeys’ by the board members increased the perceived organizational distance between production employees and the board members accompanied by ‘posh’ ladies or new clients. The quote suggests that the world of the production hall and the world of the board are usually separated and that the employee experiences a clear us–them divide, echoing the definition of organizational distance (Hsiao et al., 2017).

The recognition of expertise in the social workplace was mainly discussed in relation to the overall transformation of Dutch social workplaces from sheltered workplaces into competitive production companies, resulting in a struggle between caring and producing (Van der Torre, 2016). The supervisor of the mailing and packaging division explained that she had knowledge about every employee in her team, for instance, how to approach employees or leave them alone. This was deemed essential in the early caring model, but there was no time for that anymore due to the production model of the contemporary social workplace:

I don’t think the board knows how important the knowledge is that I have about each employee. I know how to play the game every day, but you don’t know these things just like that; that is the result of a year-long investment. (interview)

Almost every week, we witnessed the supervisor balancing between caring for the team and reaching production targets. She often raised the point that it was difficult for her and her fellow supervisors to meet targets and deadlines while taking care of employees. As the supervisors believed that this struggle was not resolved by the board and the overall production manager, the supervisors made arrangements among themselves to exchange orders and help one another in meeting deadlines while boycotting work meetings with the overall production manager (field notes). At the same time, the overall production manager reported experiencing the same balancing act:

Within the production halls, the short-term orders result in stress and unrest, which might increase absenteeism. Long-term orders with a low intensity and a constant work pressure without peaks is much better for employees. Yet, the shareholders prefer short-term orders because they yield more production and profit. (field notes)

Due to the perceived lack of communication, involvement and recognition of each other’s expertise at all levels, it seemed that the supervisors and the production manager did not know about each other’s shared struggle. This led the supervisors to arrange business among themselves, boosting a sense of belonging to that supportive group while worsening the feeling of organizational unbelonging as a whole and impairing the perceived health at work among employees (dealing with peaks in workload and frustrated supervisors), supervisors (balancing caring and reaching goals) and overall production managers (basically struggling with the same balancing act).

As in the industrial production company, the spatio-material dimension of belonging also plays a role in the social workplace. Here, the productional halls were located in different wings and hallways than the offices of managers, board members and administrative departments. Yet, while all employees in the industrial production company could move freely from one building to another, production employees in the social workplace mainly stayed within the production area during most of their workweek. To enter the office area for meetings with HR or occupational support, their supervisor either had to accompany them to open the door or they had to ring the bell so the receptionist could (after confirming the appointment) give them access to the office hallways. As researches, we got badges that gave us conveniently access to both hallways, with the exception of the board and finance hallway. A few weeks into fieldwork, we remarked that most employees of the mailing and packaging division knew that we had access and they deliberately waited for us to get in and out of the office area. The badge as a material object articulated the internalized biographies of organizational unbelonging (the feeling of not fitting) in relation to space or, stated differently, of those who belonged and had access to both areas and those who did not belong and only had access to the production area. The badges’ underlying mediation of (un)belonging serves as an example of how spatio-material dimensions of belonging fuel organizational dimensions of belonging.

Some supervisors are explicitly aware of the impact that spatio-material dimensions of belonging can have and therefore actively shape the dimensions:

During my job interview, they asked me what I would change first. I said, ‘The cardboard should go.’ They were surprised. My office-to-be was a kind of glass fishbowl in the middle of the workshop. My predecessor covered the window behind the desk with a cardboard so that the employees could not look into the office from a part of the workshop and vice versa. If you are an employee on that side of the workshop, you will feel excluded, and as a supervisor, you will have a long distance from that employee because of that. (field notes)

The emphasis on the feeling to be excluded, due to invisibility, reiterates how spatio-material aspects impact how employees experience in- or exclusion at work and how this may foster or impair one’s feeling to be an integral part of a system and, thus, one’s perceived workplace health.

CONCLUSION: (UN)BELONGING AS AN INGREDIENT OF WORKPLACE HEALTH

This paper aimed to elucidate how belonging and health are related within the realm of the workplace. Knowing that individual measures of WHP have little success, we aimed to grasp what workplace health entails by zooming in on everyday life dynamics and practices in two companies in the Netherlands.

First, we have found that workplace health is fundamentally social. Our examples show that workplace health is constructed by social practices among colleagues that care for each other, work on tasks together and are able to signal each other’s state of mind. Put simply, in order to perform or produce, employees need to feel good. For employees to feel good, we have shown that, contrary to mainstream individualized WHP activities, social aspects are key. This resonates with the physical/psychological dimension of belonging that implies being valued, needed or important and the feeling of fitting in as fostering our perceived health and contributing to our psychological and social resilience (cf. Hagerty et al., 1992; Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Mattes and Lang, 2021).

Second, our data suggest that there is more than only the feelings of belonging to colleagues in order to feel good at work. Employees of both companies also referred to organizational aspects that impacted their perceptions and experiences of workplace health, such as being appreciated by managers and having the feeling that their expertise was involved in decision-making. While these aspects could also be associated with Hagerty et al.’s (Hagerty et al., 1992) definition of belonging, these were aspects aligning with a higher organizational level. This level is similar to Yuval-Davis’ conceptualization of political dimensions of belonging that construct, claim, justify or resist forms of socio-spatial inclusion and exclusion (Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 204). In our case, the organizational dimension of belonging was about the extent to which employees felt being needed, valued or important and felt to fit in within the integral system of the organization. In relation to workplace health, this political dimension of belonging may boost confidence and the sense of belonging together, while a lack of recognition may result in frustration and demotivation, showing how organizational dynamics affect employees’ perceived health at work.

Lastly, where the previous two dimensions of belonging are mostly social and procedural or democratic (in terms of involving employees in decisions), our data point out how experiences of belonging and unbelonging are also mediated through spatiality and materiality. Like Filstad et al. (Filstad et al., 2019), we have shown how this spatio-material dimension of belonging can be produced through physical distance between departments, access restrictions and clothing. Yet, the paper goes further in arguing that such aspects produce and maintain constellations of belonging and unbelonging that, in turn, feed into employees’ perceptions and experiences of workplace health.

The strengths of this paper are found in its holistic approach to workplace health instead of studying social relations at work, health or health at work in isolation. The methodological underpinnings of our study facilitate such an approach, since ethnographic research methods are well suited for a grounded and open inquiry of workplaces that allows understanding the interconnections and dynamics of daily practices. As such, we hope to have deepened previous understandings (Eakin and MacEachen, 1998; Gunnarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir, 2003) of how social relations contribute to workplace health. By bringing different disciplines together, this paper has come to understand the relation between belonging and health as having physical/psychological, organizational and spatio-material dimensions. More importantly, we have brought insights from these disciplines to the workplace in order to see how workplace health is exactly experienced and how belonging, or not, contributes to this.

At the same time, a possible weakness of our study could be that we only conducted fieldwork in two organizations. On the one hand, this has provided the study with in-depth and valuable insights. On the other hand, including more organizations could have provided more insight into other dimensions of belonging that we may have missed.

Implications for WHP research and practice

On the basis of our findings, we argue that experiences of (un)belonging at work should be regarded as important ingredients of workplace health. To accelerate WHP programmes focussing on the individual, organizations should take into account the dynamics that mobilize and mediate experiences and practices of (un)belonging, such as collegiality, task divisions, recognition of employees’ expertise and role in organizations’ primary processes and employees’ involvement in decision-making. Organizations could mobilize implicit knowledge by frequenting the work floor more often, paying sincere attention to employees, their expertise and worries. Furthermore, responsive leadership styles are essential to recognize and make use of employees’ expertise. In tandem, it would be good to turn away from project-based interventions with predefined goals and outcomes that are not apt to respond to contextual events and dynamics.

While we agree with Gunnarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir (Gunnarsdóttir and Björnsdóttir, 2003, p. 72) that managers have ‘a responsibility in fostering a positive working morale’, it is important to stress that it is not just their responsibility to take care of the health of employees in lower ranks of the company. Our analysis shows that managers also need to belong in order to experience optimum health in the workplace themselves. Hagerty et al.’s (Hagerty et al., 1992) understanding of belonging as being valued, needed and important and the feeling to fit in into an integral system, also holds true for WHP practice. This calls for a radical participatory and inclusive approach of WHP in which, (i) managers do not stand above WHP but are employees themselves too, and (ii) where all forms of knowledge and expertise are taken into account in decision-making.

AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS

L.T. and D.B. were responsible for data collection and analysis. Together with A.M. and K.H. they were responsible for the study design. A.M. and K.H. reflected on data collection and interpretations during the analysis. L.T. was responsible for drafting the manuscript and D.B., A.M. and K.H. critically reviewed the manuscript, conceptualizations and theoretical interpretations of the data. A.M. and K.H. supervised the study. All authors read and approved the manuscript.

FUNDING

This work was supported by ZonMW and SBCM A&O fonds SW under Grant number 531001406.

Declaration of Interests

No conflicts of interest are involved in this article.