E76: The Power of Community in HR with Kimberly Marolda

In this episode, Kimberly Marolda, Director of HR at Hamilton Thorne Inc., stresses the need for community building in the workplace to ensure a safe and reliable work environment. She speaks on the importance of face-to-face interactions, creating a welcoming space, and knowing colleagues’ personalities. By fostering connections with team members, managers can support personal and professional growth.

• Soft skills build connections within the organization.
• Blurred boundaries in work and life have led to an increase in emotional intelligence and wellness programs.
• Building a sense of community is essential in achieving work goals.
• Facetoface interactions are crucial in developing relationships and trust.
• Allowing moments of silence in meetings fosters thoughtfulness and consideration.
• Vulnerability and nonjudgmental behavior are key to creating a safe and supportive workplace.
• Good communication and team building are critical to achieving goals and overcoming obstacles.

• Hamilton Thorne Inc.
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• 02:07 – One focuses on those softer skills, building the connections with team members and members of the group as a whole, outside of your own team if you manage one. But you have to make connections with everybody within the organization. And having those softer skills and those abilities to make, build relationships and ask questions that encourage people to open up. That was really important to, to have as an HR profession, a skill set.
• 25:14 – So learning about who people are and what they do and allowing moments of silence to happen in meetings allows for thoughtfulness and consideration. And I think it’s really important to really understand who everybody is as a human. Both not, you know, inside the workplace, most importantly, and to some degree outside of the workplace. So you can understand a little bit more about who they are.
• 05:09 –  You know, in my career I’ve come across, you know, people that, you know, want to get to know me, want to understand how to help. And then I’ve come across people who are like, you need to leave your issues and your emotions at home. Do not bring them here. Do not tell me about it. Do your job. So, you know, do you see a, a transition from more of the hard structure?
• 12:44 – Lindsay: And it’s really, really amazing to see what happens when people come together. You know? Absolutely. A common cause whether that’s a child’s well-being or, you know, in the workplace.. Kimberly: Because it feels more, it feels selfless and less like work if you’ve, if you’re engaging in a way where you want to contribute, and you want to support, and you want to help and provide a foundation that, that people can rely on, I think that that is so self-fulfilling as well.
• 11:07 – Lindsay: And there’s also in families, I feel like there’s that rule of, like, you don’t disrespect adults or elders. You treat or you always treat them with respect. But you know if someone’s disrespecting you, you have the right to stand up to that because you’re… Kimberly: Not a family. Exactly. So I like to use the term community instead because I feel like that helps set more boundaries, but it also focuses on building an engaging a pool of people that are all gathered together for a common purpose, a common goal, and they have a shared set amount of time. This is the project we’re working on, this is the amount of time it’s going to take to push through this.