This week we talk to Dr. Michelle Samura, Associate Professor of Education and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education at Chapman University about her groundbreaking research on building belonging.

Listen and see how Michelle’s latest research, The Architecture of Belonging, is helping companies create better workplaces for our very diverse workforce.

This podcast series engages industry-famous experts to join host Kevin Steinberger (@kevinjsteinberger) to talk about the stuff that’s changing the face of the way we work.
#RealEstate, #Workplace, #Facilities, #HR, and #IT -- all of these traditionally siloed departments are combining forces to build a future office like you’ve never seen but need to hear about.

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript:

Kevin: That's fantastic and thank you. It is very refreshing now to see the combination of different tactics and different research that is actually shaping and molding the trends for offices. And I'm seeing it now where we're starting to see even speakers from even the retail and the hospitality sector that are putting a massive influence and working with their corporate real estate teams, outfits and renovations and how that sort of all comes down to creating better human experience within these spaces. I've mentioned this before, Michelle, you do bring something very special to this conversation and you are, I would say one of our, in my eyes, one of our out of the box titled speakers at the show. And with saying that as a dean and an academic who is sought after for speaking engagements, obviously elsewhere obviously from myself for this conference, how does your specific role and your title mesh with the corporate real estate workplace and HR sector?

Michelle: Well, I'm glad you asked that because I could imagine as people are scrolling through speaker bios and seeing some incredible speakers and workshop leaders who are industry giants, VPs, and HR and workplace strategy of facilities and corporate real estate. And then all of a sudden they get to an associate professor and associate dean of education and I'm sure people are wondering what I'm doing in this space. And so I'm glad I have an opportunity to address that. So I'm drawn to the spaces in between, so in between disciplines, in between institutions, in between groups, and I really enjoy making unconventional connections. In fact, recently I've been involved in some exciting work to bring together leaders from the education community and business community here in Orange County in order to develop and retain local talent across multiple sectors in order to continue to ensure a thriving economy in our region.

But for my research, my interest in making these unconventional connections has meant drawing upon and combining insights and approaches from typically disparate fields such as education, geography, visual sociology. I use photography and image analysis as a method, urban planning, architecture and design in order to understand the development of belonging and community. My in-betweenness also has meant that my research insights can inform a number of contexts, certainly the traditional educational settings such as classrooms and campuses, but also as you stated workplace settings including the corporate real estate and HR world. And I know I bring a different perspective to the corporate world with insights that not only address the interplay between the physical environment and social interactions, but also give serious consideration to diversity. And so, while there's certainly a compelling body of research that clearly indicates the benefits of diversity and a range of settings including educational settings in workplace settings to name a few, organizations of all sorts still struggle how to develop inclusive environments.

By using this spatial approach, my research offers both a way to understand and to address issues of diversity, belonging and inclusion. And to add one more thing about bridging work I'm doing between higher ed and workplace settings, I'm conducting another related study that's focused on the major disconnects between life stages and the spaces that people inhabit during those stages. So think about the transitions between even kindergarten to first grade, from kindergarten open play more opportunities for students to just explore to first grade where oftentimes you walk into classrooms where things are very set, in some cases, rows of desks that students are now having to sit in and then transitions from elementary to middle school or high school that those shifts, high school to college, college to workplace, even workplace to retirement. And if we zoom in on that high school to workplace or even college to workplace transition, there's still so much work to be done to inform both the college and workplace settings on expectations of students as they become employees and the support and training individuals would need during that transition.

Kevin: Wow, thank you. And it's so refreshing to be able to bridge higher ed in this space. And we're starting to see even some new job titles and very different job titles coming into all of the workplace events, not even just Future Offices. And there's so many out there now and it's great to see sort of the innovation amongst sectors now, the different titles, the different titles that the companies working together now seeing a very large spike in the HR teams that are now working with facilities teams and these workplace visionaries at some of these major companies. Question for you, what are you seeing as the main obstacles to feeling a sense of belonging? And I'm very interested in this question because I think this is something everyone can relate to, everyone who is in the workforce, who is in the even the commercial sector. So again, what are you seeing as the main obstacles to feeling a sense of belonging?

Michelle: So I actually think that one of the main obstacles is how people view the concept of belonging. There are some who suggest that belonging is about fitting in, so how individuals fit or don't fit. Others think of belonging as a feeling or a state of being. And in fact the way that a number of researchers capture data on belonging contributes to the view of belonging as a state of being. So if you ask a survey question, like on a scale of one to five, how much do you belong? It's a useful data point, but it's a static data point at a particular moment in time about a certain context.

Michelle: I instead view belonging as a process more specifically an interactional process. And this means then that belonging requires effort. It requires work, maintenance on both the part of the individual as well as the group or organization. And I also think there are a lot of misconceptions about who belongs with whom or what. For example, person A looks like person B, therefore person A and B likely will have things in common or want to be around each other. And this isn't to say that that couldn't be the case. What I'm saying is that we need to check our assumptions about to whom or what we think people want to belong.

Kevin: Amazing. And as soon as you said that, I started thinking about maybe what my even personal definition of belonging would be especially in the workplace. And in a very facetious way for me it might just be another redhead coming into the company and us just having that connection as redheads on the office floor. That would do it for me. Yeah. But in all seriousness, let's talk disconnects that you're seeing, especially with how space might hinder belonging.

Michelle: Right. So this is an area that I'm investigating right now. And to kind of give an example on a certain aspect of this, existing research indicates that familiarity may have an effect on belonging. And I'll use an example from some of my research. So this will focus on college students to explain this further, but I think there are some concepts and insights that are applicable across different settings. So as part of the data I collect in student housing and residence halls, I asked students to draw maps of their own residence hall, and then we collectively analyze them. And there've been numerous times when students would draw a picture of double loaded corridors, long hallways with rooms on both sides and then drawing question marks at both ends of the hallway or whatever sides of the hallway. And more often than not, these are the students who then go on to indicate that they experienced less belonging than say the students who are able to write in the names of all their roommates or floor mates.

And now the design of double loaded quarters actually is intended to facilitate interactions, which would then lead to greater familiarity. But we can't assume that the space alone we'll do what it was designed to do. In fact, it could sometimes do quite the opposite, such as creating greater isolation as in the case of some of the students in my study. So we need to consider how space can be activated. What programs, policies, even spatial cues that I mentioned earlier could be integrated to align with the spatial design and perhaps lead to fuller realization in the design intention? And this is when viewing belonging as an interactional process as something that requires effort and deliberate intentionality from both the individual and the institution comes into play.

At Future Offices Winter 2020, January 22 - 24 at Convene 225 Liberty Street, Dr. Samura will have her own session expanding on what we talked about in this podcast. Join her session:

Building Belonging: Designing Inclusive Workplace Experiences
How can a spatial approach to understanding workplace experiences strengthen your company’s climate? How might your workplace more effectively facilitate belonging? And how can diverse voices and perspectives of key stakeholders inform these efforts? The purpose of the “Building Belonging” workshop is to engage participants around these questions and explore how a spatial approach to examining belonging and inclusion in the workplace can help decision makers better understand and address the needs of diverse stakeholders.

Key Takeaways:
Workshop participants will gain interdisciplinary insights and an understanding of research-based approaches that emphasize diverse personnel perspectives in order to more effectively design and support inclusive workplaces. As a result of participating in this session, attendees will be able to identify possible design elements in their respective workplace settings to enhance belonging.

Dr. Michelle Samura is Associate Professor and Associate Dean in the Attallah College of Educational Studies at Chapman University. She also is the founding Co-Director of the Collaborate Initiative and principal investigator of the Architecture of Belonging project. Dr. Samura conducts research, publishes, and speaks on the relationship between space and belonging. For the past 15 years, she has studied diverse student experiences on college campuses and is currently is gaining insights from the fields of design and architecture on key design principles and elements of built environments that promote belonging in educational, workplace, and community settings.