Emotional culture at work affects every aspect of work and sense of belonging is the best indicator of a healthy emotional environment. Everyone plays a part in influencing the emotional culture at the workplace. 

Emotions are contagious and the emotion we bring to the workplace is the emotion we spread. Encouraging some type of emotional expression to increase workplace happiness and motivation. Some of the ways to enable people be conscious of emotional energy at work and normalize emotional expression are:

• Check in with everyone by asking how everyone rates their mood on a scale of zero to ten, and then ask people who feel less than five what they can do to raise their number.
• If someone is feeling anxious, create the culture in which it is ok to leave the meeting for sometime, to take care of anxiety and come back or take mental health day.
• Lead by example. If there is a situation that is stressing you out and slowing you down, be open about it and show the team how the perspective can be changed and be cheerful about it. What you think is how you feel.
• Have empathy and compassion with people going through hard times at work.
• Make a norm of eating or having coffee together. It helps in knowing each other better and increases chances of emotional expression.
• Model the behaviour of steering negativity and complaining to positivity by asking questions like: What could you have done differently? Or what can you do about it now? This will make venting and complaining less fun so it will be avoided in future.

By observing what’s going on around your workplace you can tell what the workplace culture is. If people are talking with smile on their face, asking for help, offering help etc shows friendly culture where displaying emotions have space but if people are only focused on work and no one feel safe asking for help and no one cares even if they see someone need help, because they only care about their own work, this is the culture were people are not enjoying and feel judged when sharing anything.

Creating a sense of belonging helps employees thrive. Most people’s day is spent at the workplace or working with their colleagues even when working from home, so only surviving at work will not last long. Target is to thrive so that there is motivation to work and be innovative. Here are some ways to create sense of belonging:

• Use colleagues’ names and make sure you are pronouncing correctly. ask if not sure. 
• Plan to know each of your colleagues well, find opportunities to go for lunch or have a catch up meeting. 
• When a new hire starts, find some common things between him and the team, to help develop connection and sense of belonging.
• When someone joins a conversation, help him catch up before continuing.
• Thank you if any one goes out of the way.
• When someone is talking to you, give full attention and not look at your phone or computer.
• If someone is talking but got cut off, make sure to ask him to continue sharing their thoughts and listen to him. Ensure everyone has an equal voice.
• If someone behaves in a way that makes you feel excluded, always assume good intentions and talk to him and he will learn from his mistakes.
• When working remotely, be mindful of the time zones.
• Set up virtual lunches or set up pair calls i.e. the calls in which pair is made randomly and there is no agenda. It gives a chance to co-workers to get to know each other, talking about their families, their hobbies and their favourite shows.

Sense of belonging does not mean that there will be no difficult periods but if there is a sense of belonging the difficult time will pass easily. Contribute to a healthy culture at your workplace and make it a happy place where emotions are given importance, being cognizant of emotional burdens your colleagues carry and enabling a sense of belonging.