Building Community Within The Workplace with Kelli Oberndorf

Building a sense of community within the workplace is more than just a trendy concept; it's a powerful driver of employee satisfaction and productivity. When colleagues feel connected, supported, and valued, it not only enhances their work experience but also contributes to a positive work culture. But how can organizations effectively nurture this sense of community that benefits both employees and the company as a whole? Join us in this episode with Kelli Oberndorf, co-founder of Ekatā, a company deeply committed to fostering a supportive and enriching workplace environment. In this conversation, we delved into the topic of improving work culture through community-building. Kelli also shared valuable insights from her own journey of career growth and transformation. Tune in and let’s explore the keys to creating a thriving work culture together! --- Listen to the podcast here: Building Community Within The Workplace with Kelli Oberndorf Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Something I’ve covered in some previous episodes, although maybe not some of the most recent ones, is how the idea of work being a place you don’t want to be is really embedded into our culture. Think about what people say, “Sunday scaries,” “Wednesday is hump day,” “Thank God it’s Friday.” The premise behind all those statements and so many more is this general idea that maybe work isn’t something you dread, although Sunday scaries pretty much implies dread, but it’s a place you don’t really want to be. You’d much rather be doing something else. And while it’s probably never going to become the case that work becomes your favorite thing to do, and if you found a place in life where your job is the thing that you really want to be doing more than anything in the world, my hat’s off to you, you’ve reached something amazing in life, we can find ways to make our work culture and the environment that we’re around in work something a bit more favorable, something that we want to do, something that we want to be at. My guest today, Kelli Oberndorf, is the co-founder of Ekatā, an organization that helps improve workplace culture through some interesting ideas primarily founded around community. --- Kelli, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. Well, thank you for taking the time out to talk with me today about this interesting topic that’s kind of on this intersection of community, which is something that many of us are lacking in life over the past quarter century especially, as well as how we feel about our work and what our work culture and how it facilitates what we want to do and how we feel about life. Exactly, yeah. So, at Ekatā, we’ve really created our mission around building community within the workplace, which is definitely a relatively new concept around how we behave at work, although behaving at work is something that is quite a topic these days, especially around the pandemic when we saw the great resignation where hundreds of thousands of people left their work. Now, when we say that number, it’s a huge number and there are a variety of different reasons why people leave their work environments, especially around the pandemic, whether that was they can’t do a full-time job and take care of my kids the same time, which is certainly a different reason to leave work than what maybe we’ll be speaking about here today which is really more around how we behave at work, our interpersonal relationships and the quality of those relationships and the idea that we actually can create work environments that we want to and love to work at and it takes practice, it takes time, and also, mostly, it takes awareness of how we’re behaving now and then the inspiration to want to make that different, want to make it better for the people who work within our organizations. So what inspired you to think about it in this kind of fashion? Many people look at work culture and people come up with plenty of ideas about what’s wrong with our work culture, whether it be opportunities to advance, whether it be the flexibility people need, what made you decide that community was the thing that you wanted to focus on with regards to our work culture and work culture improvements? So mine really came from past experiences, and I was a healthcare administrator for 13 years and that’s primarily where I had all my leadership training, good or bad, or in a lot of ways non-existent, and when I worked for healthcare, and as you can imagine, it is a complex industry, there’s a lot of moving parts, and for a manager and an administrator, all those moving parts, you’re kind of put right in the middle of them, whether you’re having to interact with a patient who’s upset or a physician who has high expectations and maybe a micromanaging perspective or your staff. And so what I found is that there wasn’t a lot of synergy between all those parties and I got the brunt of that as a manager and leader. So, what ended up happening was I became deeply discontented with those work environments and I did kind of this, “Oh, well, it’s this company so maybe the next company will be better.” I know that feeling. I fell for it, it was absolutely something that didn’t work for me, and what I recognized was it was really a systemic pathology of the industry itself and a lack of focus on the people who work inside of those organizations, what they need to be successful. And so many of the people I worked with and who worked for me in particular were great. They were good technicians. But what they lacked was these interpersonal skills to actually build relationships and that became incredibly problematic and it also became something that chipped away at me, my psyche, my self-confidence, my ability to be inspired about working in the industry. And I left. I left in 2019. The impetus was being laid off and when that happened, I really took that as a message, as an opportunity to leave the industry. And after I sort of worked through my own process of letting go of some of that anger, that frustration, the sadness, the disappointment of putting so many years, a master’s degree into this industry, to turn my back on it was hard to swallow. It felt in some ways that I had failed in my attempt to be successful in the roles that I was hired for. After the sort of acute feeling started to wane and I worked through some of that, in terms of what was next for me was is there a way to take those negative experiences as lessons, a way to transform those to helping other organizations not fall into those traps? And so that’s sort of the impetus of why I just sort of started on this journey. And then, for me, community has always been, especially in my private life, something that’s been a very rich experience, I’m blessed with an amazing family, an amazing community of people and friends who are really up for big things, up for having and building deep relationships with each other, not staying on the surface, actually diving in, and so this was kind of the intersection between my past experiences that weren’t great, my vision for helping others progress, and what that key was was really around, well, can we build sustainable work communities and that takes time and effort and awareness, like I said earlier, but I do think it’s entirely possible. So that’s been a bit of my journey. So I also want to talk a little bit more about this letting go process, because I’m sure there’s a lot of people listening out there that are in a situation similar to where you found yourself where it’s like, okay, whatever I was doing, whatever I put a lot of effort into, whatever I had even put a little part of my identity into, to be honest, is now not really working for me. So would you say that letting go needs to be the first thing you do in a situation like that? And if so, what is something that someone can do in the letting go process? Is it a bunch of rituals? Do you find a new identity? Do you find a new effort? What helps someone let go so that they’re open to exactly the types of inspirations that you encountered when you decided eventually to come to Ekatā? I feel like letting go is such a personal process, so I can tell you from my perspective, one thing that’s really important part of the process of letting go is really understanding what exactly you are letting go of. And in order to do that, you actually have just experience those feelings, those thoughts and emotions about what is the discontentment, and that takes a lot of introspection around, well, what is it that I don’t want to repeat in the future? I don’t want to fall into the same trap of what I did before, which is, “Oh, the grass is greener, oh, this is better, oh,” so it took me actually a moment to just sort of sit, sit in those emotions, sit in the contemplation of, well, what didn’t work and what is it that I need to change? What are some of the behaviors that I need to change? I love that you said identity because my identity was absolutely 100 percent wrapped up in my career because I had this desire, I really wanted to make a difference and I felt like I wasn’t. I didn’t. Maybe on a small one-on-one scale, I had great relationships with certain people, but on a wider scale, I didn’t feel like I actually made a lot of progress. And for somebody who really wants to do that in my life, I had to sort of reconcile those feelings that maybe it just wasn’t the right fit for me. And there was also a lot of dreaming, actually, that happened as well of letting go of those and that, of course, isn’t a choice, that’s a subconscious experience. I can’t say, “Well, make sure you dream and then you can let go.” And it was a big part of my process of moving through those motions. But then, there was a moment when there was like a deciding and so through the journey of letting g