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?