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What if your company culture wasn’t just an HR buzzword but the secret weapon to scaling your business?
Welcome to Kan Talk Kulture, the podcast that dives deep into how remarkable company cultures are intentionally built and how they can transform your team, your business, and your bottom line.
Hosted by Kylie Anne Neal, founder of Kan Kulture and a passionate expert in people, culture, and leadership, this show is designed for business owners, CEOs, HR professionals, and anyone who believes that empowered people are the key to long-term success.
Each episode features real conversations with inspiring CEOs, business leaders, and culture champions who share how they’ve shaped their team environments alongside case studies, practical tips, and bold questions that challenge the status quo.
Whether you're looking to boost employee engagement, create a high-performance team, or align your people with your vision, this podcast will help you connect the dots between culture and growth.
At Kan Kulture, we believe in Kindness, Understanding, Learning, Trust, Uniqueness, Respect, and Evolving, and this podcast brings those values to life.
If you're ready to turn your team into your biggest brand ambassadors and create a workplace people love, this is the podcast for you.
Find out more at www.kankulture.com
Hi, I'm Kylie Anne Neal, founder of Kan Kulture, and welcome to Kan Talk Kulture. In this podcast, I sit down with some of Australia's most progressive founders and CEOs to explore the heart of their company cultures, what drives them, what they value, and what it's really like to work for the companies they lead.
You'll also find occasional episodes packed with practical HR insights to help you build s- safer, stronger, and more trusted workplaces. So whether you're a new team member getting to know your workplace, curious about creating remarkable company cultures, or just wanting to know more about implementing HR best practice, you're in the right place.
Let's dive in
Today I wanna talk about belonging. Belonging is a word that's been so thoroughly flattened by corporate use that most leaders now hear it as a soft topic, something for the culture committee, something that lives near the pizza budget. In 2003, researchers at UCLA put people inside a brain scanner, and they asked them to play a simple online game.
Three players, one ball, passed back and forth on a screen. Partway through, the other two players stopped throwing to the participant. That was it. That was the entire cruelty of the experiment, a ball on a screen from strangers that they would never meet. The region of the brain that lit up was the one that processes the distress of physical pain.
It's not a metaphor. It's not similar to. The same neural territory. So when someone in your organization says, says that they feel left out, understand what they're actually reporting. They're not describing a preference, they're describing an alarm. It's a response in them. I wanna take it back because belonging is one of the most physically consequential conditions in your workplace, and the evidence for that is not soft at all I also wanna deal directly with something that I hear constantly, which is that team building is a perk, it's a reward, it's a nice thing to do when the year has gone well and there's money left over.
I think that framing is one of the most expensive misunderstandings in modern management, and I wanna take it apart properly today. So let's talk about the evidence. In 2003, there was a, a study done where participants played a virtual ball-tossing game while undergoing MRI. During social exclusion, activity in the anterior cingulate cortex increased relative to inclusion and correlated positively with self-reported distress.
The anterior cingulate is the key reason for the distressing effective component of physical pain. The finding has been extended since. Later work found that when rejection is powerfully triggered, regions involved in the sensory experience of pain become active too. There's an evolutionary logic here that makes it obvious in hindsight.
For most of human history, separation from the group was not an emotional inconvenience, it was a death sentence. If you've got no group, you've got no food, you've got no protection, you've got no reproduction. So the brain borrowed the alarm system that it already had, the one that says, "Something's wrong.
Attend to this now." Which means when a person is excluded at work, their brain does not file it under professional disappointment. It finds it... files it under danger, and that has consequences you can measure in output. Belonging drives performance. Let me be very specific about that mechanism, because this is where the business case lives.
First Threat narrows cognition. When a brain registers social threat, it prioritises vigilance. It monitors, it scans, scans faces, tones, who was invited to what, whether that comment meant something. That monitoring runs on the same executive research that you need for complex reasoning and creative problem-solving.
So a person who does not feel secure in their place is quite literally thinking with less. Belonging determines what people say out loud. Every valuable thing an employee could tell you carries social risk. Disagreeing with a plan, admitting to error, saying, "I don't understand," flagging that a client is unhappy.
Whether a person takes that risk does depend almost entirely on how secure they feel in their standing with the group. So your error rate, your speed of problem detection, and your quality of decision-making are all downstream of belonging, not adjacent to it, downstream. And third, belonging is what converts a group into a team.
Discretionary help, the covering of each other, the picking up of the thing that's not your job. That only happens when people feel that they're a part of something rather than employed alongside of it. So you can't mandate that in a position description. It is entirely a function of whether people feel mutually responsible.
And number four, belonging predicts staying, not just satisfaction, actual retention. People leave managers, yes, but more often, they leave the experience of being replaceable. And fifth, and this is the one leaders underestimate the most, belonging actually determines how much difficulty a team can absorb A team with strong belonging can take a bad quarter, a bad year, a lost client.
They can take a restructure. A team without it fractures under the same pressure. Belonging is the load-bearing structure of your team, and you no- only notice it's missing when weight is applied. The scale of the problem, Gallup, around one in five employees globally report experiencing loneliness a lot of the previous day.
Fully remote employees report the highest level at 25%, compared with 16% of fully on-site workers, and hybrid workers between the two at 21%. Gallup also found that engaged employees are 64% less likely to be lonely than those who are not engaged. Employees who feel their opinions count are 39% less, less likely to be lonely, and a best friend at work was actually one of the weaker protective factors at 21%.
Sit with that last one, because it dismantles a very popular assumption. Friendship at work helps, but it's not the main driver. Feeling that your opinion counts matters almost twice as much Belonging is not primarily social, it's actual structural. It comes from mattering to the work, not from liking your colleagues.
There's a big difference there. KPMG in 2025, they found that 45% of employees reported feeling isolated and alone at work, which was actually double the previous year. And at the same time, 87% said close work friendships were very important, up 6 percentage points. KPMG described this gap as a friendship mirage.
Connection on the surface, loneliness underneath. Three words that get confused. Before we go further, I wanna separate three terms that get used interchangeably and mean quite different things, because the confusion between them is why so many interventions miss. Engagement is about the relationship between a person and their work.
Do I find this meaningful? Am I using my strengths? Do I know what I'm contributing to? Inclusion is about access. Am I in the room? Am I invited? Do I get the information? Are the systems designed with someone like me in mind? And then belonging is about the felt experience of mattering. Is my presence noticed?
Would my absence be felt? Do I have s- standing here? You can have all three, and that's the goal, but you can also have inclusion without belonging, which is actually extremely common and extremely painful. Someone invited to every meeting who never feels their contribution alters anything. Present, included, and entirely unsure about whether they matter And that distinction is worth holding because most organisational effort goes into access, which is measurable, and very little goes into standing, which is not.
Access is necessary. It's nowhere near sufficient. Now, I wanna spend a moment on something, because the Gallup numbers make it unavoidable. Fully remote employees reported loneliness at 25%, compared with 16% of those fully on site. But I would be cautious about the conclusion that many leaders jump to, which is that the answer is to bring everyone back in.
Proximity is not belonging. Plenty of people are profoundly lonely in a busy open plan office, and the mandate itself, imposed without consultation, does its own damage to autonomy, which we've seen a lot of recently. The more useful reading is that co-location was doing a lot of belonging work invisibly and for free.
The corridor conversation, overhearing how a colleague handles a difficult client, the unplanned five minutes after a meeting where the actual issue gets raised. Nobody designed any of that. It was just a by-product of a shared space You remove the space and you've not created a belonging problem. You've revealed that you never had a belonging mechanism, only a belonging side effect.
So the work is to design it deliberately. Design deliberately what pro- proximity used to do accidentally. So that means creating unstructured contact rather than only scheduled meetings, because belonging is built in the margins rather than in the agenda items. And it means being far more explicit about information flow, since remote people cannot absorb context ambiently, and it means over-communicating attribution, because the person on the screen has almost no other way of knowing that their work registered.
And the, the organisations that are doing this really well that I've seen, and not the ones with the best video conferencing, they're actually the ones who accepted that distributed work requires an intentional social architecture, and then they built one. The friendship mirage. That phrase is worth stealing because I, I see it constantly.
Teams with active group chats, reaction emojis on every announcement, birthday messages, a culture channel, photos from the Christmas party, all the visible markers of a connected team. And underneath those things are people who genuinely believe that if they stopped showing up, the work would carry on and no one would particularly notice.
Visibility is not belonging. Activity is not belonging. Belonging is actually the experienced answer to a specific question, and the question is this If I disappeared, would this leave a hole? Let me deal with the perk framing directly because I, I think it actually does real damage when we think of it that way.
A perk is something optional that improves an experience which would otherwise still function. A coffee machine is a perk. The office works without it. People are marginally less happy, and that's the whole cost. Belonging is not in that category because the thing does not function without it. Remove belonging, and you don't get a slightly less pleasant version of the same team, you get a different team.
You get a team with worse information flow, slower problem detection, less discretionary effort, and higher turnover. And that's not a diminished experience, that's degraded infrastructure. We already understand this distinction elsewhere. No one calls the accounting system a perk. No one describes the induction process as a treat.
Those are mechanisms, and we fund them because the business does not run properly without them. Belonging belongs in that category, and the reason it's not treated that way is largely historical because it sits in the eel, the emotional register, and we've inherited a management tradition that classifies anything as emotional as discretionary, as a perk.
So here's the reframe that I would offer any leadership team. Stop asking whether you can afford to invest in connection, and start asking what's it costing you not to. Because you may already be paying for low belonging. You're paying for it in the escalations that arrive too late, in the same problem being solved three times in three silos, in the recruitment fee for the person who left in month 14.
You are just not coding these costs to the right line So what about team building? This is wh- where I want to be genuinely nuanced, because I think both of the usual positions are wrong. Position one is that team building is a waste of money, and adults should do their jobs. Position two is that team building is the answer to a culture problem.
Neither of those positions are right. Here's how I'd put it. Team building is not a perk and it's not a fix, it's a mechanism, and like any mechanism, it works when it's designed for a purpose and fails when it's deployed as a gesture. The reason so much of it fails is that organizations use it to substantiate for structural belonging, rather than to build it.
If people are excluded from decisions, kept out of information flow, or unable to see their impact, an afternoon of activities doesn't touch any of that. It can actually make things worse, because the gap between the performance of connection and the daily experience of it becomes impossible to ignore.
But when the structure is sound, deliberate connection, work that does something the structure alone can't. It builds the relational bandwidth that difficult conversations can later draw on. Think about what actually makes a team effective under pressure. It's the ability to disagree without rupture, to give hard feedback and have it land as care, to say that, "I got that wrong," without catastrophizing it Every one of those depends on a stock of relational trust that was built somewhere other than in that pressured moment.
It's the credits. And this is what connection time is for. It's actually not for morale, and it's actually not for reward. It's depositing into an account that you're going to draw on the next time something goes badly wrong. So the question to ask of any team activity is not, did people enjoy it? It's, did this team build something we can use?
Did people learn something about each other that changes how they will work together? Did anyone see a colleague differently? Did we create a shared reference point that will still exist in six months? Escape rooms and bowling can absolutely do that, incidentally. And I'm not being snobbish about the format.
It doesn't matter. What matters is whether the design creates genuine interaction between people who do not usually work together, and whether leaders participate as people rather than supervising from the edge of the room with their phone out. And the, here's, here's the practical test that I will give you.
If your connection activity is the first thing, if it's the first thing canceled when the quarter gets tight, you've already told your organisation exactly what category you put it in. People notice that. It's more of a honest statement of your values than anything on the wall, the cost you are already paying.
Let me put some structure around the commercial argument here, because I think it's stronger than most people realise, and it's rarely made properly. Start with recruitment. You know what it costs you to replace someone, advertising, agency fee if you use one, the time your managers spend in- interviewing, and then the ramp-up period during which the new person is being paid full salary for partial output.
And for most professional roles, that lands somewhere between a third and a full year of the salary once you ca- once you count everything honestly. Now ask how many of your departures in the last two years were people who could not point to evidence that they mattered? Not people who got a better offer, people who stopped feeling connected and then became receptive to a call from a recruiter out of the blue Which is a different thing and a much more preventative one.
Then look at problem detection. Think about the last significant issue that reached you later than what it should have. Trace back to when the first person in the business knew about it. The gap between those two dates is a belonging measurement, and you can usually put a number on what it costs. Then duplicated effort.
In low-belonging organisations, information does not cross boundaries because sharing across a boundary requires a relationship. So two teams solve the same problem independently and neither knows. That is pure waste, and it's invisible in every reporting system you have. And finally, the quality of your decisions.
If people don't feel secure enough to disagree, you are making decisions with less information than you think you have. You experience that as a leadership team with strong alignment, it's often a leadership team with strong compliance. None of those costs appear on a line item called belonging. They appear as recruitment cost, project overruns, write-offs, reworks Which is exactly why the investment never gets made.
But the cost is real, and it is filed everywhere except where it would be visible. What exclusion actually looks like at work, and I wanna talk about this for a moment 'cause this is a part that leaders miss because we picture exclusion as something aggressive. We picture it as, like, bullying or freezing someone out or deliberate cruelty, and it doesn't actually look like that.
Most workplace exc- exclusion is administrative. It's the decision that was effectively made in a corridor before the meeting, so the meeting was theater. It's the, the person on the screen in a room-based meeting who can't read the body language, can't interrupt, and stops trying by week three. Or, um, it's the, it's the information that flows through an informal channel of people who've been there the longest.
It's the new starter who got a laptop, a login, and a lunch, and six months later still doesn't know who to ask about anything. Or it's the project where everyone in the know understood was already resourced, announced as an open opportunity. Or is the person whose idea gets acknowledged only when someone more senior repeats it.
My gosh, haven't we all had that? Or it's the team that has an in-joke from an event that half the department was invited to. So none of that, except for the last one, is, is really malicious. All of it registers in the same neural system as pain, and the person experiencing it usually can't name what happened well enough to raise it, which is precisely why it goes unaddressed for years.
It's also why exit interviews are such poor instruments here. No one says, "I left because I never found out about things first." They say, "The role was not quite the right fit," and you record it as a fit issue, and you change nothing. The people it hits hardest, one thing worth naming, exclusion is not evenly distributed, and the people most affected are usually the people least able to raise it.
New starters. Obviously, because they've got no accumulated standing to draw on and no way of telling whether what they are experiencing is normal here Anyone who is the only one of something in the room, the only person in their function, the only one at their level, the only one working remotely. The only one of anything makes them visibly distinct.
Being the only one means every ambiguous moment carries an extra interpretive question. People returning after an absence, parental leave, extended illness, or a secondment, the organisation has moved on, and the informal networks, they've been reconfigured, and the returner is often treated as though they never left.
Which actually sounds welcoming, and actually means that no one's helped them to re-enter. And it's also, like, really evident in part-timers, part-time employees who miss a portion of everything by design, the decisions made on the days that they're not there, and the context absorbed in the room that they're not in.
Like, this is almost universally unaddressed. In each case, the person is unlikely to raise it, because raising it requires admitting to a vulnerability in an environment where you already feel provisional. So it goes unreported, and then appears 18 months later as a resignation that pfft you didn't see coming.
So the practical implication is that you should not wait to be told. Look at those four groups specifically and ask what your mechanisms do for them. Usually, the answer is nothing, because the mechanisms were designed for the majority case. Let me help you talk about the mechanisms. So if belonging is infrastructure, it needs mechanisms.
They need to be deliberate, funded, owned things that produce it reliably rather than by luck. So what can you do? Number one, fix your information architecture first. Take one recent significant decision and map it honestly. Who knew it was coming? Who found it in the announcement? Who found out afterwards from someone else?
The order in which people learn things is a live weekly ranking of what matters in your organisation, and everyone can feel their position in it. Then design the sequence deliberately rather than letting it follow the informal network. This is free, and it changes more than any activity you could book Number two, make onboarding a belonging process, not an access process.
Most onboarding is systems and compliance. Here's your laptop, here's your login, here's your policies, here's a lunch. All necessary, none of it produces belonging. Assign a named person responsible for social integration who's not the manager, a buddy for a better word. Give a new starter something small and real to own inside the first fortnight, because contribution is what converts you from a guest into a member.
And check in at week six, not week one, because week one everyone feels welcomed, and week six is when the reality lands. Number three, be explicit about who is consulted and who is informed. Most exclusion pain comes from ambiguity. If people know that they're being informed rather than consulted, that's absolutely fine.
What damages people is believing they were in the room and then discovering they were not. Name it up front and the injury disappears. Number four, design meetings for the least connected person present. If one person is remote, run the meeting as though everyone is. Start with the thing that requires everyone to speak, because the first two minutes set who is a participant and who is an audience.
Notice who's not spoken, and bring them in by name on something specific. Not with a general invitation, because a general invitation puts the burden of interrupting onto a person least able to do it. Number five, make contribution visible and traceable. If somebody's work changed an outcome, say so. Say it by name.
Say it in front of people who matter to them. Not as praise, as attribution. Praise is pleasant. Attribution is evidence that you exist in the system. And number six, protect and fund connection time, and put it in the calendar like anything else that matters. Reoccurring, predictable, and defended. It should not need to be justified each time, because a thing that must be justified repeatedly is a thing everyone knows is temporary And build it around actual interaction, not entertainment.
People need to talk to each other, not to watch something together. Seven, measure it or it will always lose to things that are measured. You do not need a sophisticated instrument. Two questions will get you most of the way. Do you feel your opinion counts here? And if you're away for two weeks, would your absence be noticed by the people around you that you work with?
Two questions. Track those by team and you will find your problem areas immediately. Now, let me describe the destination because it's more specific than most people expect. In a team with strong belonging, people disagree openly and it doesn't become personal. It's actually the first observation marker.
Disagreement is a luxury. It's, it's good and it only appears where people feel secure enough to risk it. Bad news travels fast and upwards. Somebody tells you about the problem on the day it happens, not the week it becomes unavoidable. That single behavior is worth more commercially than almost anything else on the list.
People help outside their remit without being asked and without keeping score. New starters contribute meaningfully within about six weeks rather than six months because they're not spending that time working out whether it's safe to speak or not. And when somebody's leaves, people are sad rather than indifferent and they stay in touch.
That's not sentimentality, it's a direct indicator that the relationship had substance and it has a measurable commercial consequence in referrals and returning employees. If you want a single question for your leadership team, it's this, when was the last time someone in your organisation told you something you did not wanna hear?
Early enough for it to be useful. If you cannot think of a recent example, that's your belonging data. A word to leaders about your own belonging, because there's one more thing that goes unsaid. Leadership is structurally isolating. You can't be fully unguarded with the people that you manage, and the more senior you get, the smaller the population of people who can see you as a person rather than as a decision-maker.
And that, that really matters here. That matters here for two reasons. The first is your own health, and the evidence on isolation is not ambiguous. The second is that a leader who is lonely tends to build lonely organisations, 'cause you can't design conditions you've never experienced. So find your own group, peers, a network, other founders, and not for business development, not for sales calls, for the thing itself.
There's a version of this conversation where belonging sounds sentimental, and I want to be clear, belonging is not sentimental. You have people in your organisation right now whose brains are running a low-level threat signal every day, and not because the work's too hard, because they can't tell whether they matter here, and that, that's the signal that costs attention.
It costs people's energy and judgment. It's being paid for out of your performance. So the question that I want to leave you with is not whether your people like each other. It's actually whether each of them could point to evidence from the last month that their presence, their presence changed something If they can't, no amount of social budget is gonna fix it.
And if you've been treating connection as the thing you do once the real work is done, I would gently suggest that you have it the wrong way around. So please, leaders, take a look at what belonging looks like in your workplace. If you have leaders within your organisation that you think should hear this message about belonging and put mechanisms in place, then please share this episode.
If you'd like to get in touch with me, I can help you with mechanisms for your workplace. You can contact me on kanculture.com. That's K-A-N-K-U-L-T-U-R-E.com. Thank you for listening, and I look forward to seeing you again in the next episode. Thanks for joining me on Kan Talk Kulture. I'm Kylie Anne Neal. I hope today's episode gave you a clearer view into the values driving your workplace or sparked new ideas about building a remarkable company culture.
If you're a founder or CEO interested in sharing your culture story, or if you're looking to build a safer, stronger, and more trusted workplace, let's connect. Visit kanculture.com, that's K-A-N-K-U-L-T-U-R-E.com, to learn more. Please hit that subscribe button to hear more real conversations with founders and CEOs and hands-on episodes full of people first culture advice.
I look forward to connecting with you on our next episode