The Expectations Arc: row seven of ten.
"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul."
New here? This is row seven of ten. Start with #044 and the People Expectations Framework™, both free.
Last week, row six asked whether speaking up changes anything: asked, not heard. This week stays in the relational currency and turns to the row organisations celebrate hardest on day one.
Row seven gets the most effort on day one. The laptop is ready. There is a welcome lunch, a buddy, a hoodie with the logo, a photo on the intranet. Ask HR whether people belong here, and you get an onboarding programme.
Ask the analyst who joined eighteen months ago, and you get another answer. Her buddy moved teams in month three. The manager who hired her left in month nine. When she resigns, the leaving card goes round, and two people ask which team she was in.
Simone Weil wrote the line above in 1943, in a report on how France should be rebuilt after the war. It was published in 1949, after her death. She called rootedness the least recognised need, and she defined it by taking part: you have roots where you play a real and active part in the life of a community. A welcome lets you in. It does not give you a part. Row seven measures that distance: between being welcomed and being kept.
The framework states the expectation plainly: that I will be part of something, with colleagues I can rely on and leaders I can believe. And it names the three tests: whether connection is real across hybrid work, whether my manager shows up for me, and whether anyone would notice if I left.
So here is my position, before the evidence: the organisation does the recruiting. One manager and a few colleagues do the rooting, and most organisations have left them alone with it.
Expectation first, experience second, and then the test no onboarding survey runs: the absence.
— Tanguy
This week's content
Row seven, read four ways: what people expect from the place they work, how connected they feel, who holds them there, and what loneliness costs. Then the seventh Expectation Gap: a self-audit and five metrics.
🤝 WHAT PEOPLE EXPECT 🤝 | Workmonitor 2026 | Randstad (2026) | Is community a perk, or a term of the deal? Randstad surveyed more than 27,000 workers and 1,225 employers in 35 markets. 72% say their workplace provides a sense of community, down from 79% a year earlier. Trust in colleagues (76%) and in leadership (72%) both slipped, and the youngest trust the least. 31% have quit a job because the atmosphere was not collaborative. People put a price on community. Almost a third have already paid it by leaving.
⚖️ WHAT PEOPLE GET ⚖️ | State of the Global Workplace 2026 | Gallup (2026) | How connected do people feel? Gallup's World Poll interviewed 141,444 employed people between January and December 2025. 22% experienced loneliness for much of the previous day, up from 20% in 2023. Under-35s report it more often (23%) than older colleagues (21%), and managers (23%) more often than the people they lead (21%). One in five is not a crisis headline. It is every fifth person in your next team meeting.
⚓ WHO HOLDS PEOPLE THERE ⚓ | Global Talent Barometer 2026 | ManpowerGroup (2026) | When everything else wobbles, what holds? ManpowerGroup surveyed 13,918 workers in 19 countries in September 2025. Its overall barometer fell to 67% as confidence dropped. One benchmark still climbing is trust that your manager has your best interests in mind for your career: 68%, up from 63% two years earlier. The institution is trusted less; the person in front of you, more. That is good news with a catch. The bond sits with one individual.
📉 WHAT LONELINESS COSTS 📉 | No Employee an Island: Workplace Loneliness and Job Performance | Academy of Management Journal (2018) | Is loneliness the employee's private business? Hakan Ozcelik and Sigal Barsade studied 672 employees and their 114 supervisors in two organisations, measuring loneliness first and performance later. The lonelier the employee, the lower the supervisor's rating. Two things carried the effect: lonelier people became less approachable and less committed to the organisation. The design cannot prove cause, and the authors say so. But loneliness does not stay private. It turns up in the appraisal.
The Expectation Gap: row seven
47% name work as a top place of belonging. 85% feel excluded there.
Here is the figure for your next people review, and four things it tells you.
Work is where people find belonging, and where they are left out. EY surveyed more than 5,000 employed adults in five countries in September 2025. 47% name work as a top place of belonging, second only to home. In the same survey, 85% say they feel excluded at work, up from 75% in 2023. EY's definition is modest: left out, unrecognised or undervalued. The two leading reasons are work that went unrecognised and a meeting of peers held without them. Nobody is excluded at the welcome lunch. It happens on an ordinary Tuesday, months later. And the welcome is shakier than it looks: among the 4,736 US professionals Michael Page surveyed, 45% consider leaving on their first day because of bad onboarding.
Row seven, measured: where people find belonging, and what else they meet there. Same respondents. EY Global Belonging Barometer 4.0, 2025.
People belong to a manager, not to a company. In Randstad's survey, 72% report a strong relationship with their manager, up eight points in a year, and 63% feel closer to that manager than to the company. Now read the same respondents again: 55% avoid raising issues with their manager for fear of their job, and 50% take the question to AI instead. A bond that half the team will not bring a problem to is strong in the survey only. It is thinner still under financial strain: fewer than half of those workers trust their manager or feel cared about, compared with about two-thirds of the financially secure (PwC). And a bond held by one person leaves with that person. In a study of 330 employees in 45 veterinary hospitals, those with the strongest relationship with their manager were less likely to quit than their colleagues. In the nine hospitals where the manager changed, employees were more likely to leave.
The office helps. It does not root anyone. In Gallup's data, on-site people in jobs that could be done remotely are the least lonely (18%); hybrid and fully remote workers are the most (24%). But on-site workers whose jobs cannot be done remotely sit at 21%. AI is no villain either: in Gensler's survey of 16,459 office workers, people who use AI regularly are more likely than late adopters to say they can rely on their team (86% against 74%). Leaders sense what is at stake: of the 3,000 business and HR leaders Deloitte surveyed, 72% say the sense of belonging is a part of their culture to keep as AI arrives. Baumeister and Leary explained the pattern in 1995. Belonging takes two things together: "frequent interaction plus persistent caring." A mandate supplies the first. Only people supply the second.
Share the rooting. Run the Absence Test. Employers know where belonging lives: 66% of the employers Randstad surveyed are telling managers to check in more often. That instruction lands on the wrong shoulders. In Gallup's data, leaders are ten points more likely than individual contributors to have felt lonely the day before. So give the job to the team. Once a quarter, the team answers one question for every member: who would notice within a day if this person stopped showing up, and what would stop working? Where the answer is nobody and nothing, you have found the gap before the resignation letter does. The one-day threshold is mine, not a research finding. Then say it in the deal: we will make sure someone here knows your work and would notice your absence.
The organisation does the recruiting. One manager and a few colleagues do the rooting.
Your turn. Who at work would notice, within a day, if you stopped showing up? Hit reply; I read every one. And if you know a leadership team about to order people back to the office to "rebuild the culture", forward this before the memo goes out.
🧭 The row-seven self-audit
Three questions for your next leadership meeting. Yes or no.
When a manager moved on in the past year, did each person on that team get a handover of the relationship, and not only of the work?
In the past twelve months, have we compared how our remote, newest, youngest and lowest-paid colleagues score on belonging with everyone else?
Do we know who in the organisation has no colleague depending on their work?
Three "no" answers mean your belonging strategy is an onboarding programme. The five metrics below show who is rooted, and who is only recruited.
📏 Five metrics for row seven
No new inventions: three validated instruments and two counts from your HR system, read together rather than one by one.
Ostracism. The Workplace Ostracism Scale: ten items, validated across six samples (Ferris, Brown, Berry & Lian, 2008). It measures the headline properly: how often people are ignored or left out, not whether they "feel excluded". Read it by team, tenure and work arrangement. There is no public benchmark; track your own trend.
Workplace loneliness. The workplace version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale that Ozcelik and Barsade used, the one that predicted supervisor-rated performance. For a quick read, Gallup's daily question. Benchmarks: 22% worldwide; 18% on-site in remote-capable jobs, 24% hybrid, 24% fully remote.
Links. The links dimension of job embeddedness: the people, teams and groups a person is tied to at work (Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, Sablynski & Erez, 2001). Embeddedness predicts who stays, beyond job satisfaction and commitment. The people with the fewest links are the ones the Absence Test finds.
Managers per person. From HR data: how many line managers each person has had in the past 24 months. One study puts the base rate at about one work-unit leader in four vacating the post in any given year (Li, Hausknecht & Dragoni, 2020). Every change resets a bond.
Exits after a manager change. From HR data: voluntary exits in the six months after a manager leaves, compared with everyone else, split by how long people worked for that manager. It is Ballinger and colleagues' finding, tested in your own organisation.
🎶 Mixtape Monday
Don't You (Forget About Me) — Simple Minds (1985). Written for the film The Breakfast Club, the song was turned down by the band and several other acts, then recorded in a few hours. It went to number one in the United States. The film puts five teenagers who would never share a table in one room on a Saturday. The question left hanging is whether they will say hello on Monday. That is row seven: recruiting is Saturday, rooting is Monday. Tomorrow on LinkedIn: the song, and the test no onboarding survey runs.
Next week — #052
🌱 Row eight: Development — Sunday 22 November
Row seven asks whether anyone would notice if you left. Row eight asks whether anyone is invested in who you become. Next week, we read the eighth Expectation Gap: the distance between the training catalogue and the next role.
Ten rows, ten Sundays. In December, subscribers receive the complete Expectation Gap: all ten rows in one workbook, with the questions and five metrics for every row. Stay for the set.
— Tanguy
Mini-lexicon
Recruited, not rooted — the row-seven finding: the organisation recruits and welcomes, but people judge belonging by whether they are known and missed months later. This edition's frame.
The Absence Test — once a quarter, the team names for each member who would notice within a day if they were gone, and what would stop working. The row-seven lever.
The need to belong — Baumeister and Leary's term for a basic human motivation, met only by frequent contact combined with lasting care from the same few people. The thing an attendance mandate cannot supply.
The Expectation Gap (row seven) — the distance between "that I will be part of something, with colleagues I can rely on and leaders I can believe" and what people judge they get: whether connection is real across hybrid work, whether my manager shows up for me, whether anyone would notice if I left. This edition's measure.
Development — the expectation to be invested in: skills, progression, mobility. Read next Sunday as the gap between the training catalogue and the next role. Row eight.
Method
The Expectation Gap sits inside the People Centricity Methodology™: Empathise, Strategise, Realise, Analyse. It is Empathise made measurable, the first two links of the People Centricity Formula™, read one row at a time.
References
Ballinger, G. A., Lehman, D. W., & Schoorman, F. D. (2010). Leader–member exchange and turnover before and after succession events. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 113(1), 25–36. https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jobhdp/v113y2010i1p25-36.html
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497
Deloitte. (2026). 2026 global human capital trends: From tensions to tipping points: Choosing the human advantage. Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/content/dam/insights/articles/2026/us188555_ghct2026_introduction/pdf/DI_2026-Global-Human-Capital-Trends.pdf
Dulac, T. (2026, September). People Expectations Framework™. PeopleCentriX. https://www.peoplecentrix.eu/people-expectations-framework
EY. (2025). Global belonging barometer 4.0: Global insights to connection and belonging at work. EYGM Limited. https://www.ey.com/content/dam/ey-unified-site/ey-com/en-gl/noindex/documents/ey-gl-global-belonging-barometer-11-2025.pdf
Ferris, D. L., Brown, D. J., Berry, J. W., & Lian, H. (2008). The development and validation of the Workplace Ostracism Scale. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(6), 1348–1366. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012743
Gallup. (2026). State of the global workplace: 2026 report. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/697904/state-of-the-global-workplace-2026.aspx
Gensler Research Institute. (2026). Global workplace survey 2026. Gensler. https://www.gensler.com/gri/global-workplace-survey-2026
Li, H., Hausknecht, J. P., & Dragoni, L. (2020). Initial and longer-term change in unit-level turnover following leader succession: Contingent effects of outgoing and incoming leader characteristics. Organization Science, 31(2), 458–476. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2019.1295
ManpowerGroup. (2026). Global talent barometer 2026: Report and key findings. ManpowerGroup. https://www.manpowergroup.com/en/insights/talent-barometer
Michael Page. (2026). Talent trends 2026: Hiring through the hype (USA). PageGroup.
Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., Lee, T. W., Sablynski, C. J., & Erez, M. (2001). Why people stay: Using job embeddedness to predict voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 44(6), 1102–1121. https://doi.org/10.5465/3069391
Ozcelik, H., & Barsade, S. G. (2018). No employee an island: Workplace loneliness and job performance. Academy of Management Journal, 61(6), 2343–2366. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2015.1066
PwC. (2025). Global workforce hopes and fears survey 2025. PricewaterhouseCoopers. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/workforce/hopes-and-fears.html
Randstad. (2026). Workmonitor 2026: The great workforce adaptation. Randstad N.V. https://www.randstad.com/workmonitor/
Weil, S. (1952). The need for roots: Prelude to a declaration of duties towards mankind (A. Wills, Trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1949)
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