TRANSCRIPT - Season 6 Fostering Community.

 [00:00:00]

Hello, and welcome back to season six of the work life by design podcast. It has been a little bit of a hiatus since our last episode, because it was an absolute marathon last year. I think I recorded almost 48 episodes. , In a row, so you can expect to see something a little bit different happening this year.

, if you've been around for a while, you'll know that at the beginning of every year, I undertake a complete review of my life, my work, everything that's going on. I use my Live A Life app. By design planner, which you can find out more about over on my website. And I run people through that one as well.

But when I was doing my own, one of the things that really came up for me and the focus for me this year is going to be on creating a sustainable plan. Now that sustainability plan means that I need to be looking in a much more sustainable way. If I'm going to be on this journey. Planet for at least another 60 years.

And that is my dream. Then I need to make sure that I am working in a way that is going to support that. And running at a marathon of 48 of those episodes last year is definitely not in the plan. So this year you can start to see something a little bit different. We're going to be recording more of a sprint.

So you can expect to see two shorter eight [00:02:00] week seasons, this year, focusing on some really specific topics that I'm seeing around, the workplace industry. So to kick us off for this particular season, though, I wanted to just take a moment to think back. And when we first started it was July, 2020.

Now, if we think our minds back to July, 2020, the world was a very, very different place. We were kind of sitting in this limbo land where the pandemic had kind of happened. We were in and out of lockdowns, depending which state you're in. The world looked very, very different. Now, if we think about where we are 4 years on, So much has changed and so much has changed in the way that we think about work, about where we work, about how we work, and most importantly, our workplaces have significantly changed to support a completely different way of working in the way that we think about work.

And the other thing that I think we really started to realize off the back of the pandemic was that we started to actually see our workplaces as communities. Now, back in 2018, I rebranded the business and we went from being Marsden Collective to community and And community was all about building our workplaces as communities, where we see these shared beliefs.

We see these shared values. There's these shared stories that make us a community. Now, back then I was a little bit for my time and people didn't quite understand what it was that I was banging on about. But fast forward to the pandemic and we really started to see. What our workplace has meant to us.

We really started to see that they were a community. They were a place that we felt like we belonged to. They gave us a sense of meaning. They gave us a sense of purpose. And that is what I really want to tap into in this season of the podcast. Season six, we are going to be talking about how we create community within our workplaces.

Now, if I look at what do we do at community, our namesake, We are a team of [00:04:00] workplace dynamic strategist, design advisors, and change leaders. And we work with organizations to really help them understand what it is that they're trying to do in their business. What are their strategic objectives? What are they. Doing there that is important. What is their purpose?

What do their people do and understand how they communicate, how information flows, how they connect? And what we want to do is start to align how those workplaces begin to support their people. And enable those organizations to achieve their goals. So that is really what is at the heart of it all. It's about fostering the creation of community where people feel connected.

Because we know that where people meet, there is where a community is formed. It's those shared values, those shared beliefs, those shared experiences that give us that collective sense of pride, of meaning, and like what we're here to do matters. And that's what we need to be looking at in terms of our workplaces.

It's all about creating those communities. Now, this season all started as all good things do, while we were on holidays. So I was actually spending a couple of days up in beautiful Noosa with some business girlfriends and we were strategizing all things, work and life. And it was while we were floating around in the pool, drinking our morning coffee and, you know, munching on our croissants.

That This kind of came back to me and it was a real awakening or an aha moment that really reconnected me back with what I had envisaged for community as a business back in 2018. And it was really kind of one of those moments which just smacked me in the face and kind of went, this is what has been at the core of your business and what you do for so long.

And it's about time we got back to some of those roots.

So that is what we're going to be talking about this season. And it's really about ensuring that we do get back to those roots of what it means to create a community. Although my sense and my understanding of what it's going to take to create a community in our workplaces has significantly involved.[00:06:00]

And that is what I plan to share with you through these next couple of episodes and how the role of place has transformed in supporting that role of creating community.

So throughout the season, we are going to be celebrating. Community and what it takes to create a community.

I'm going to be sharing with you a framework that I have developed that is going to help you build the foundations for your community in your workplace. And I'm going to be talking with you. Thought leaders with academics and other curators of community to share some of their experiences with us as well of what they've seen work, how they see that show up, how this is transforming cultures, how it's transforming and organizations from the inside out.

Because one of the things that has begun to extremely frustrate me is this continual conversation about mandating returns to the office. Because I think that if we're still having these conversations about mandating people coming back to the office, putting them back to work off, Then we are seriously having the wrong conversation.

So stay tuned for the next few weeks and we'll be dropping new episodes every Tuesday so that you can tune in and you can follow along and learn how you can start to build community in your workplace so that you don't need to worry about those return to the office mandates or those policies to bring people back in.

You're going to be attracting them and drawing them back in because your community is going to be so excited. So magnetic. I look forward to sharing those episodes with you, but until then, have a great week and I will speak to you next week.