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!
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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.
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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,
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 go and then kind of looking ahead, there was the shift in this decision of like, actually, there was something that just didn’t systemically worked for me in that experience but not everything, so what can I grab to move forward? What was I actually really good at? I was really good at connecting with other people. I was really good at standing in front in training, it was like the best part of my job. I think letting go is also like reconciling like, hey, it’s okay that that didn’t work out. It’s okay. I don’t need to hold on to grudges there or resentments or frustrations about certain people or interactions that I had or companies that I worked for that weren’t aligned with who I am. That process, I think, is really unique for everybody.
o maybe that’s journaling, maybe that’s therapy, maybe that’s coaching, maybe that’s, whatever that feels natural and organic for somebody to actually reconcile those and be complete so then what can open up after that letting go is possibility, is vision, is the ability to take action in a different way.
I think people use drugs, alcohol, being excessively busy, excessive social media use as a way of never entering the letting go process but you also talked about this possibility that someone starts the letting go process but they get stuck in some kind of a cycle of emotion, possibly resentment, possibly resentment at themselves for not having discovered what they need to discover 5, 10, 20 years ago.
Yeah, I mean, that’s what I would say, Steven, is really the resentment is such a big part of what creates an environment for somebody who doesn’t have the ability to let go of and, as you point out, substance use, substance use in the workplace is an incredibly difficult and problematic issue that comes up when we’re talking about toxic work cultures and things of that nature. I do think that holding on to issues that have happened in the past and like mulling over those things, “God, that person is such a jerk,” or, “If they had just done X, Y, and Z, then I wouldn’t be in this situation,” and really allowing yourself to get stuck in the past, I think is probably, sort of even in general, just the reasons why we can’t or don’t move forward in our lives. And when we can take ownership for that and say, “Hey, you know, that is what happened, that person is who they are,” that physician is who they are, in my case, or that boss, you can’t really do anything about it, especially in the past. There isn’t anything you can do about it if you’re no longer with that career. I think, though, understanding and letting go, I always think of the proverb around these two monks that were together and there’s a woman, this empress who comes in, she looks down on everybody, these monks cross her path and there’s water and she doesn’t want to walk through the water and so this monk, this young monk puts her on his back and takes her through the water and sets her down, is really proud that he was able to serve and provide and he puts her down and she, “Get away, you’re just a peasant of some sort,” and as the two monks are walking back to the monastery, he’s ruminating and he’s upset, “I can’t believe she was so mean. I helped her out,” and the older monk said, “You’ve put her down hours ago, why are you still carrying her with you?” I really feel like that proverb really speaks to why we don’t move forward, is because we continue to carry these experiences and these people with us to the detriment of ourselves. You have to teach yourself, you have to actually actively do that. And like I said before, I feel like that’s a personal choice and process.
I’ve heard some other versions of this proverb too, like it’s 8 p.m., why are you extending your workday by being so mad about what your boss said to you five hours ago or something like that, but the first step is awareness that this is what’s happening, you are putting an extra burden onto yourself by continuing to think about it, continuing to ruminate on it, and then the next step is probably just finding your own way to get rid of it, whether it be journaling to get it out of your system, whether it be yelling into a soundproof room that no one can hear, or all those other things that people can come up with. Does this process sometimes take a while? Because some people can get repeatedly hurt and I think about some work environments where you’re under the same lousy boss for multiple years, sometimes even beyond a decade for some people, and it seems like that can get mapped into your subconscious, it’s not something you can easily do in a week or two and just be done with it.
Absolutely. I mean, my acute process of leaving that career was six months but it went a lot farther than that because of what you pointed to, the subconscious mapping. I was in the industry for 13 years. I had a lot of experiences, I interacted with a lot of people, I had a lot of similar experiences with physicians, in particular, and so you start building stories and/or assumptions on how everyone is or how it will always be and I do think that there is, when you talk about how long that takes, I think it really does take a while and maybe there are people who can say, “Okay, I’m over that, I can move on,” and, man, I envy those people sometimes who have that quality to shift and say, “All right, you know what? That was that and I’m moving forward.” That isn’t the case with a lot of people because so many people put their heart and souls into the work that they do every day. That reconciliation of leaving that job, leaving that career, even leaving that boss can take a really long time to process depending on how deeply ingrained those experiences were or how often they happened. I think patience and self-empathy and compassion can really help because it’s not always easy either.
Yeah. And some of it has to depend a little bit on kind of the environment you’re around. Here’s a little bit of a wildcard question. Since the idea behind this is that you’re focusing on the past, if someone’s trying to expedite their process, so let’s say someone just wants to get through this rumination, get on to the next thing, do you think they should limit the amount of nostalgia they’re exposed to so that they’re continuing to think about the world now and not think about anything from the past?
That’s a good question. I’m not sure I have the answer to that question. I think there are a lot of reasons people stay in their jobs and a lot of that is some of the good stuff. Maybe it’s their best friend who works in the other department and you guys can go out and just complain and rip people out, and I think that there is something that is cathartic about that. It’s not always the most productive when we are in agreement with others, especially about how bad something is, then we get that confirmation bias and it starts to kind of get ingrained. But the nostalgia part, the good parts so often are why we stay or the idea that it could get better. As far as like leaving it in the past, I think there’s nothing wrong with saying, “Man, I miss that. I miss that person. I miss those people that I worked with. I really wish I could work with them again.” Those are valid feelings. Maybe you loved your customers or maybe you — like there’s a lot of reasons why we stay in jobs even when they’re bad because usually there’s something good about the experience. I think there isn’t anything wrong with reminiscing about what was good about those experiences. And, in fact, that can help you complete, like, “Oh, it wasn’t always that bad. I’m so glad I had that person because, man, it would have been a lot harder if I didn’t have that person as my coworker, my friend.”
Yeah, it reminds me of that song that Macklemore did with Kesha I think seven or eight years ago called “Good Old Days.” The song discusses what it was like for them before they made it in the industry, when they were like struggling and playing shows for so few people, how everyone has that thing, and looking back and saying there was so many good things about it. And we tend to take past periods of our lives, past periods of society and paint them with a broad “This was good, this was bad” brushstroke. This decade was a good decade, this decade was a bad decade. This experience was a good one, this was a bad one. When there’s always some mixture, some nuance.
Absolutely. We live complex lives. Humans are complex and there are a variety of different experiences that we can have within one experience. There’s a reason why we stay with partners that maybe overall aren’t good for us but there’s maybe something really good about it. Those lessons that we’ve learned from the past, and I think when I pointed out earlier how I made the transition was it was really using what I had learned, good and bad, in that environment, and choosing to take forward or transform those experiences into something good.
Yeah.
And I think you’re right, there are tons of examples of how you take one experience, you go to a concert and you love the band and you love the music but the people who were there were kind of jerks and they were all drunk, whatever, and so, there’s, again, you saw your favorite band, you love your favorite band, and yet there was an experience there that wasn’t quite as favorable as you wished. And so I do think you make a good point of being able to actually pull out those good, even if, overall, your experience maybe wasn’t as you wanted it to be or as positive.
For sure. And when it comes to community in the workplace, what percentage of people right now in the United States would you say actually have community in their workplace that they go to?
I’m not sure I could tell you a percentage. That’s so specific. I don’t know. But probably not very many.
I’d say it definitely can’t be more than 50.
It cannot be more than 50, absolutely not. I think part of it and the reason why we don’t have more community is because of how we’ve structured the workplace from the very beginning. The hierarchical structure that we have, from an operational perspective, from a personal responsibility perspective, is good to know. I want to know who I’m responsible to, I want to know what I’m responsible for, I want to know who’s at the top, who’s paying my bills, and they want to know who’s under them at the frontlines of their companies.
What is problematic about the hierarchical structure and why that doesn’t build community is because it inherently builds in power dynamics. Share on XWe even call superiors “my superiors” as my bosses, or “my subordinates.” I don’t know how disempowering, how much more disempowering even that language can be.
Oh, for sure.
Because if you’ve promoted me into a manager role or a vice president role, then I am inherently better than you or I have more power than you. Power dynamics in community never work. They never ever, ever work.
You cannot create community and have power dynamics. Share on XYou can have community and work within those dynamics to making a more harmonious experience, a more unified experience within the workplace. You can use the hierarchical structure as a place for who’s responsible for what. But when it comes to people and managing and leading people, it will never create community if we continue to have the power dynamics. That’s why in our culture transformation program that we have, we work with companies for four months. We’re with them by biweekly. And the biggest thing is that the senior leadership has to participate in the first community building program and the reason is because we have to see each other as humans first. And if we can’t see each other as humans first and we’re only seeing each other as job titles or salaries or responsibilities or where you fall on that hierarchical scale, community isn’t actually possible. We can go in, maybe we’ll make a small difference but, overall, people will go right back because if you’re sitting up on your pedestal as the CEO of an organization, you’re not going to actually be able to see your people and they’re not going to be able to see you either as a human being. And so that’s actually so much of our work is that we say we are as human centric at the very core of who we are. Because, as humans, if we can see each other as humans, then we have a place that we can work towards.
Yeah, and it feels like the world is kind of moving in that direction. Forty years ago, you would have a conversation and you were expected to call your boss, Mr. or Mrs. or Miss, like a formal title, and now it’s way more common for everyone to just refer to everyone else by their first name, which sounds like a small change but it sounds like what you’re also saying is some of those terms, I remember actually being written up at a previous job for, quote-unquote, “insubordination” and I remember how much shittier that made me feel as someone who had already achieved adulthood, I’m already an adult, why am I being written up for something that you would write up a seventh grader for? So it does sound like there’s some movement in that direction. Are there forces out there in a lot of the organizations you go into that seem to be impeding that progress, that seem to be impeding anyone from moving in that direction?
Well, I think it is the mentality that if you’re a leader, you’re somehow better or have power over someone else. I think that really impedes. The other thing that impedes is if a leader is not willing to actually look at how they’re responsible, how they are actually either perpetuating the negative culture or somehow responsible for it, if they’re not willing to say, “Wow, I actually can see that when I speak to my staff in a certain way and I come down on them and yell at them that I actually don’t see any progress. Maybe there’s a different way. Maybe there’s a better way.” When there isn’t even that the willingness to look at themselves, that will impede. The other thing that will impede is if we only look at the bottom line. If we are only looking at the money or the shareholders, that will also impede because, here’s the deal. Humans make that. Humans are the ones that are meeting with your customers. Human beings are the ones that are essentially making money for the company. I think we could probably debate that when we’re talking about AI and such but, really, there’s still human beings behind some portion of that company. And so when we focus only on the growth, the market share, the bottom line, we miss the opportunity, they will miss the opportunity to actually make strides in building and retaining their staff and leadership.
Yeah. Well, it’s been years now since I first read Conscious Capitalism, which is the book that talks about or the first one to really expose a lot of people to the idea of the stakeholders, not just shareholders, the stakeholders include your community and your employees is definitely one of the stakeholders. And one of the things that I’ve been wondering is whether or not it’s effective to think of it even from people who are really into making money bottom line type of thing to think of it as kind of trading in a shorter term play for a longer term play. Because I think one of the things I see in a lot of organizations is we’ve focused Q4 goals, Q4 goals, Q1 goals next year, the two-year roadmap or something like that, but there’s a possibility that if you’re building an unhappy, disgruntled employee base, where you’re going to have a 2.9 on Glassdoor, which I see organizations with lower than that on Glassdoor, to be honest, that you could be, in that case, really sacrificing the future for the very, very near term. Is that at all an effective way to get people to think about maybe looking at some of these things like employee wellness?
Absolutely. Yeah, I think you bring up a good point. When we’re just reacting to what’s in front of us in the moment, we definitely can miss the opportunity. If we’re saying, “Well, what’s the vision here? What do we want? How do we think we might be able to get there?” And when we’re changing human behavior, that takes time. It isn’t something that you can just engineer yourself out of or engineer yourself into. It takes time and commitment to say, “You know what, we’ve never really had a great company culture around here. We just got this new CEO and he or she is really, they are really interested in creating a better culture. People have been leaving the company.” It costs companies anywhere between $10,000 and $50,000 to turn people over, depending on the type of job position and so, let’s say a CEO sees that, they come into the company. Well, it’s not going to change in six months. It’s just not. Usually, cultural changes, if you’re committed to it, take two or three years to actually see that cycle go, “Oh, okay, now we’re really starting to hear the changes in language,” like, “Oh, I love working here,” or just getting involved, “Hey, I want to do something like this for the company,” or the people in the company want to do a Staff Appreciation Day, we want to — those are maybe some of the more surface things that could really help that we could start to listen to as leaders as ways to integrate. But some of the things that we see is a good measure is what is our employee retention rate now? And after we’ve done this culture work and we see it over time, what do we want it to be? And then reflecting on that and seeing what’s the engagement? Do we have less turnover? And less turnover will help your bottom line.
Oh, for sure. It’s a lot of money.
It’s a huge amount of money, especially now when people are having to head hunt for people because people aren’t — especially younger generations aren’t going to stick around unless there’s good company culture and they’re feeling they have a belonging and that they matter inside of their organization.
I honestly think I read somewhere that a lot of our work cultures were styled after the military because that was for many countries the first real organization to unfold, to take place, everything else was just you’re a local blacksmith, a shop keep, the person who owned the general store, and the person that takes the produce from the farm and brings it on the train and goes to market. There wasn’t ever really a really big company and then they modeled it after the military. So, other than that hierarchy, the idea this is my superior, there’s a chain of command, I’ve heard that word a few times too. What would you say is maybe the next most important thing that someone can do to create a work culture that fosters a real work community?
I think the senior leaders actually have to continue to come together and be on the same page to changing their behaviors, because the fact is that the hierarchy structure probably isn’t going to go anywhere so how can we use it to the benefit, how can we actually say, “Well, if we know that our mid managers and employees are gonna be looking up for guidance,” and it really does start at the senior leadership level. So that could be a number of things. It could be coaching. It could be ensuring that the senior leadership have opportunities to get together, maybe even have an outside facilitator to facilitate that conflict resolution, which is another huge pillar of what we do because we don’t interact with conflict in a productive way generally.
Yeah, that’s an understatement.
Generally, we just aren’t good at it, and typically we respond to conflict how we were taught how to respond to conflict, our family units dealt with conflict, what our experiences were with our teachers, with our peers, even random strangers. So when we can see, oh, wow, well, my family actually yelled a lot, or my family avoided conflict, we just didn’t even do anything about it, no wonder I’m out of here the second somebody raises their voice or I interpret it because my past says this isn’t a safe experience and, therefore, I’m out or this isn’t a safe experience so I’m going to lash out, whatever the natural behaviors are. We have to actually understand those and then go, okay, well, what would be a better way? To be able to address conflict in what we say is positive, professional, and productive ways, the PPP model of communication is what we call it, if we can learn how to do that and we can make that a value within our organization that when we have conflict, we are going to do X, Y, and Z to meet that positive, professional, and productive standard of interacting with each other around disagreements, to me, that is also a central feature in — there’s the decision, there’s the senior leadership, but usually it’s conflict that’s going to be the thorn on our sides and so we have to learn how to deal with it in a positive way.
And the conflict thing, that’s something the, quote-unquote, “rank and file,” someone that’s not in a leadership position can work on themselves, it’s like when I have a conflict with my manager, when I have a conflict with another employee, how can I find, you said positive, professional, and productive manner in which to deal with it. And I also want to ask, because you talked about some of these ways that we can kind of modify our behaviors and use that to build better communities, can this apply outside the workplace too? Because we want our workplace to be communities so that we’re productive and everything, so we’re happy, we don’t have the Sunday scaries, we don’t think of Wednesday as hump day and thank God it’s Friday anymore, but a lot of us are also kind of missing that element of community in the rest of our lives. I imagine the idea of someone that goes to work and then drives home or whatever and then probably just puts the TV on and scrolls through social media and doesn’t really interact with the people in their houses and doesn’t really have a community of people that they regularly meet up with, these behaviors, can they help that situation as well?
Absolutely.
And I remember I was facilitating some leadership training for a large organization and we went through the first module and this gentleman came back to us the next day and said, “Wow, I tried those coaching skills, those listening skills that we learned yesterday with my wife and she looked at me and she was like, ‘What’s going on?’ because I was behaving differently but what ended up happening was I was able to support her in a decision that she was having a really hard time making by just practicing these skills that we’ve learned in this work environment,” that leadership training that organization is sponsoring. So, absolutely, they’re 100 percent transferrable. I can listen to you and look in your eyes the same way that I can do that inside and I can do that outside with the people in my life.
Yeah, so it’s not like that — what’s that show called where they bring shots into a different mode from work and — Severance, is it?
Severance? Yeah.
Yeah, the real world is not like that and I think there was also the phrase how you do anything is how you do everything.
Even though we’re taught, hey, especially coming into work, leave your personal at the door, it’s impossible. We’re the same person in both places. We have different parts of our personality and I certainly am way more casual in my work life than I am in my personal life because that’s what the environment calls for but at the core, I am the same person and dealing with the same issues and I think that there’s places for both to be respecting each other, like I’m having a hard time at work, I’m going to my husband and I’m confiding in him about that and vice versa, like I have an issue with my kid and we had an issue last night and I have to come to work, I might actually have something heavy on my heart that is going to be impacting the way in which I maneuver in my daily experience. So I think when we can recognize that we are the same person and there is space for both, then we can start to say, “Oh, yeah, this skill actually can really enhance my ability to communicate with my kids,” or my mother or whoever it is.
And then so your central premise is that by improving our behaviors and improving our communication, then we’re going to naturally build better communities and so how we interact or even the frequency in which we interact, I think one of the things that a lot of people experience, especially in busy urban life, is that the people you have that are social connections outside of work and family, your friends, those interactions can become fewer and farther between as you develop more responsibilities, especially as you go from, say, a 25-year-old with an, quote-unquote, “entry level” job to like a 35-year-old that’s gotten a promotion and now has a family and now has all these other responsibilities. Can these behaviors help improve that situation, help improve people who maybe, I don’t know, should make a little more time for their communities, make a little more time to really establish and nurture these connections?
Absolutely, and I think at the core — I can stand up in front of a group of people and bring in these skills all day long, you still have to choose to engage those behaviors and skills. Just because you learn doesn’t mean, oh, that’s miraculously going to build community in my life. I think it is a choice to say, “Okay, I see how I have been acting and that’s not working. Okay, Ekatā, Kelli’s come in and she’s taught us these skill sets, we’ve practiced them in the classroom environment and now I have choice. Now I can choose to engage those skills and those behaviors or not,” or a lot of times, almost everybody will revert back, however old you are is probably how long you’ve been practicing your normal behavior or the behaviors that aren’t working, So a three-day training with me is not a miracle cure but what our goal is is just to sort of spark that insight to give you and offer maybe some different ways of engaging and inviting you to try them on and practice them in your life and also be able to be introspective to say, “Oh, man, I reverted back, let me go repair and try again. Let me practice this.” Because you are creating new neural pathways. You have to choose to engage in that and bring that subconscious more into your conscious awareness and we’re going to go back and forth and back and forth and that’s just — I go back and forth and back and forth. I’m still practicing the same skills in my life, in my daily life, especially with my family. So, there is a fair amount of compassion for the experience of being human, we do revert back to old behavior but when we can say, “You know what, I know that doesn’t work anymore, I don’t want that, I fell off the horse here,” and I can always get back on and my community now, I know I can go to my community and be like, “Hey, I’m really struggling with this employee, I’ve tried to help them and I found myself reverting back to this old way of managing them and it’s not helped. What would you do?”
We’ve seen the COVID, we’ve seen the great resignation and then we’ve seen a somewhat more recent phenomenon which is a lot of businesses almost reverting a little back in the way of the manner of, say, sometimes return to office mandates as well as some other kind of manners in which some of these older school work culture are being reasserted by some leaders. Do you see this trend continuing or do you see this as something that’s impeding our progress toward getting to this better work culture or do you see us being able to develop better communication? Do you think we need a new generation of leadership before it really kind of moves on? How do you see this playing over, say, the next five years?
When companies wanted people to start coming back to the office because I think there is a recognition of, hey, there’s something valuable in meeting us in person. We do a lot of our training in person, we prefer it because there is that kinesthetic experience that is incredibly hard to replicate when you’re not in the same room. It is possible but it’s a little more tricky, it’s a little more difficult. I’m sure some of these companies have really good intentions of like, hey, we’re really missing out on innovating, for instance, let’s get breakfast burritos every Wednesday, great, cool, breakfast burritos are awesome, I’m sure people are excited about getting free breakfast in the morning, it didn’t work.
Yeah.
And it was really interesting for somebody like me that was watching something that was created out of necessity, the pandemic, we’re all at home for safety and health concerns, that necessity turned into, in some ways, an entitlement. You’ve got this sort of push and pull happening within that structure and so companies then take the hierarchical approach and say, “Well, now, now you have to come back to the office or you’ll be fired,” and you’re right, that is doubling down on an old system. It isn’t engaging the people who it is impacting and there is a place where you can say, “Hey, guys, here are some of the issues that we see. What’s your take? We wanna hear from you guys. What would be the impact? What would be the positive impacts? What would be the negative impacts?” It is a choice for those upper leaders to say, “Here’s the thing, there’s part of this that we can’t negotiate but there’s part of it that we can. Let’s find out what those two, where we live in that and find that common ground.” I think you’re right that the unfortunate thing, and like I said earlier, reverting back to old behavior, if we do that, we will see a repeat of what those old systems have taught us because people don’t like change, we’re going to revert back. So, I do think it’s going to take a new generation of leaders, I think especially the Gen Z leaders who are a huge portion of the population that isn’t necessarily standing for poor work environments, those employees are going to start becoming leaders and when those — and maybe we’ll see. Maybe we’ll see that. Again, it does boil down to saying, “Hey, we’re not gonna do this anymore. Let’s actually change. Let’s be willing to look at our worth before we try to remove them.” I think it’s both. I think there’s probably companies that are like, wow, we would never go back to that old way of being, and I think when you, especially when you look at these huge conglomerate corporations, their incentive is going to be to go back to the old way of being.
Well, I hope we can find a way to combine the value of being in person as well as still having the employees being able to have some of that flexibility that they all had during the pandemic because we’re not robots and we don’t all have the same bodies, the same lifestyle preferences, the same minds, etc. Anyway, Kelli, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes. I wish you the best with Ekatā, with everything you’re doing to help people build community in workplace and I love this intersection of making our workplace community better, making our workplace better, some place we really want to be, as you mentioned, as well as finding a community because most of us right now are in need of community in some capacity or another in this life.
Absolutely. Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on today.
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About Kelli Oberndorf
Kelli started her career as a healthcare leader, where she developed a deep understanding of the complex dynamics within leadership and witnessed how organizations struggled with developing strong leaders and teams while also setting strategic goals and maintaining daily operations. It is through this experience that Kelli created organizational training programs that center around empowering leaders, building positive conflict resolution strategies, and fostering curiosity. She is committed to elevating workplace communities by building strong, human-centered cultures. Kelli’s 20 years of expertise in leadership, interpersonal dynamics, conflict resolution, and team facilitation help organizations strengthen their cultures and increase the joy and fulfillment in the work they do in the world.