Belonging in action at Livingston International

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How Livingston International has applied the Achievers Workforce Institute’s Belonging Model to enhance their employee engagement strategy

Livingston International is a logistics and transportation company offering customs brokerage, trade consulting, global trade management and freight forwarding solutions. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Livingston employs over 3,000 employees at more than 100 key border points, seaports, airports and other strategic locations in North America, Europe and the Far East.

Karin Knecht, Director of Global Talent, Learning, and Organizational Development talks about how Livingston International has used the belonging model to enhance employee engagement:

Why does the concept of belonging resonate for you and for Livingston International?

“We started talking about how we could prioritize DEI and decided to add a custom question in our employee engagement survey about belonging. Our goal with this question was to understand: Do people feel part of the team? Do they have a sense of belonging?”

How are you using the Achievers Workforce Institute’s Belonging Model?

“We conduct our employee engagement survey every six months. When the engagement survey concludes, we discuss the results, review highlights and hotspots, and identify trends during senior leadership workshops. These interactive sessions help us identify what we need to focus on based on this employee feedback – essentially, how can we tackle these hotspots company-wide?”

How do you measure the impact of the changes you’ve made, specifically with the Welcomed pillar?

We’ve kept the question about Belonging in our engagement survey and it continues to score very high. And while that high rating is important, what we value most is the feedback we see in the comments – that’s where the juice is!

What are some of the new things you’ve tried from an onboarding perspective to help new employees feel Welcomed?

“Our goal was to reduce turnover within the first year of employment and ensure new associates feel welcomed during their onboarding experience, whether they are in person, in the office, or remote. We looked for opportunities to add additional touchpoints with new hires. The first thing we did was introduce a Day 1 virtual onboarding for new hires where every new team member is invited and given an opportunity to connect. The session features a bit of information on Livingston, but we keep it light with the primary purpose to connect with other people who are new to the company as well as individuals who’ve worked at Livingston for years. Adding that virtual onboarding session aligned not only with the Welcomed pillar, but also the Connected pillar – making sure our new associates felt connected to each other and others in the company in an informative and engaging environment.”

How do you get buy in for something like Belonging at every level of the organization?

“Our leadership sessions help us socialize Belonging and prioritize the most important things we need to address. Having the five pillars of the Belonging Model as a framework helps with strategizing companywide initiatives. We can filter down those initiatives to the department level. Each manager has their own post-survey report and data which allows them to focus on other areas of feedback from their teams.”

“After including the belonging question in our engagement survey, we were delighted to find that Achievers had also been looking at belonging as a key contributor to employee engagement. We were able to leverage the Achievers Workforce Institute’s Belonging Model to further refine our strategy. We appreciated that this model cut out the jargon and distilled belonging to five pillars: Welcomed, Known, Included, Supported, Connected.”

Karin Knecht