Last month marked Black History Month 2025 in the United States and Canada. During February, we take the time to highlight the untold stories of Black people and their impact on our nations’ histories.
Often, common discussions around Black history are narrowed to its most digestible milestones—which leaves the realities of the Black experience excluded from conversation. This annual, monthlong observance brings our attention to the rich, full history of resilience, ingenuity, and creativity that has profoundly shaped our world today.
Black@Relativity (BRel), one of Relativity’s eight community resource groups (CRGs), is grateful to our colleagues and community for joining us in a handful of planned activities throughout February, ranging from a game of virtual Black history trivia to a video series highlighting notable Black figures in law and technology. While we all learned a lot about Black culture, we were also lucky enough to learn a few things about ourselves and each other.
Defining Belonging with BRel
For 2025, Relativity’s CRGs have aligned on “belonging” as our shared cornerstone. Throughout the year, our goal is to ensure all Relativians feel like they have a place here–and that they’re appreciated for who they are.
With this in mind, BRel posed a question to participants in our aforementioned game of trivia: “What does belonging mean to you?”
Admittedly, it’s a pretty big question for just a 25-character response, posed against the backdrop of knockoff Jeopardy music. It had all the makings of silliness, and yet all the poignancy of what compelled each of us to spend our Friday afternoon on a Teams call.
After the allotted 30 seconds had passed, answers from participants who managed to beat the buzzer populated in a word cloud on our screens (and don’t ask how Kahoot knew to use Relativity orange).
Between the speculations about whose screen name was Ed Iscovery, and the furrowing and unfurrowing of contestants’ brows, a moment of reflection fell upon the group. Each response felt just as right as the one preceding it, and the words reminded us that belonging is not one singular bullseye to aim for—it’s a constant strengthening of the threads that tie us together.
The Value of Belonging
As people, our desire to belong is universal and fundamental. We want our identities to be understood. We want our input to be both actively sought and valued. We want to walk into a room and not sense that anyone is confused to see someone who looks like us there.
Without a sense of belonging, employees are reported to be more vulnerable to stress, illness, and decreased wellbeing. Employees might disengage and are more likely to underperform, decline to bring up new ideas or concerns and, overall, are less likely to succeed. In a word, this lack of belonging can set off a vicious cycle of events that further weakens feelings of belonging and workplace performance.
Additionally, one study from career and leadership coaching platform BetterUp examined the measurable value of belonging in the workplace. It found that employees with a strong sense of belonging report a 56 percent higher level of overall job performance and are 50 percent less likely to leave compared to those who do not feel they belong.
For those who don’t have it, belonging can feel like something that must be earned through hard work. Earned by slightly changing your stories, your jokes, your reactions. Earned by diluting yourself into someone who can belong. Driven by this feeling, when you sign onto your computer in the morning, you also power on the version of yourself who knows all the “correct” references to make, behaviors to embody, language to use. You spend your day hoping that one small misstep wouldn’t expose your true identity as an “other”, instead of focusing on what makes you brilliant enough to be part of the team in the first place.
But belonging is not something we should be tasked with fighting to earn. Belonging is something we must take intentional steps to cultivate in our communities and in the workplace.
Belonging Starts with You
Last week, Relativity held the first installment in our 2025 Culture Collective series—a quarterly internal learning series hosted by our CRGs—to explore the steps we can take toward fostering more belonging within ourselves and our teams. Panelists in this session, titled “Practical Strategies for Belonging,” shared what it truly means to feel included, the role each of us play in fostering a culture where everyone belongs, and how to build bridges across differences.
What emerged as most striking from this discussion was the idea that one of the best ways to build bridges is just by being yourself—by modeling the very culture that we are striving to create.
“You can increase belonging by not only saying ‘we need to share and be open,’ but by doing that yourself and setting that example.”
– Mina Rabideaux
We each hold a particular responsibility to nurture belonging in the workplace. Relativity panelists shared that we can all start by setting expectations for respectful communication, being open to changing our behaviors, and minimizing our assumptions about each other.
But, quite simply, the most important thing you can do is make an effort. Simply make an effort to learn about others, make an effort to seek new perspectives, and make an effort to transform belonging at work from more than just a “nice-to-have” into, instead, a guarantee.
Throughout 2025 and beyond, our team will spend some intentional time reflecting on belonging: what it means, how it feels, and whether we’re fostering it in our teams. I hope you feel empowered and inspired to do the same.
