Jason Lauritsen Employee Engagement and Workplace Culture Expert

While COVID has left little in our lives untouched, few things have been as impacted as profoundly as work. Where, when, and how work gets done looks very different today than it did in early 2020. Given this tremendous disruption, how can leaders ensure their people stay engaged and productive? What needs to be done differently in this new reality?

 While much has changed, one key factor hasn’t. In this timely and important keynote, you will discover that the key to engagement, even during a crisis, is to remember that work is a relationship for the employee. Research has shown that employees crave the same things from work that they do from other meaningful relationships in their lives: appreciation, acceptance, communication, commitment, and support. You will learn how to improve employee engagement and performance by creating work experiences that feel like a healthy relationship, whether they work at home, in the office, or on the front lines.

 What you will learn:

 Employee engagement is about creating a great work relationship that feels healthy and positive

• Six ingredients of a healthy relationship and how to apply them as a leader
• Tactics and recommendations for how to foster a better work relationship for employees regardless of where or how they do their work

Leaders have confronted many new challenges throughout the pandemic. Among them, one rose to the top—employee wellbeing. Seemingly overnight, the “workplace” became less safe. Many were forced to work from home where the realities of social isolation, juggling school from home, and the loss of routine and structure began to interfere with the ability to perform.

 It became clear quickly that if employees are unwell and struggling with life, they can’t bring their best to work. Wellbeing has become a leadership imperative. In this timely and engaging keynote, employee engagement expert Jason Lauritsen will reveal why employee wellbeing is a vital ingredient to both engagement and performance, and the actions leaders must take to support the wellbeing of their people.

 What you will learn:

• A model of employee wellbeing and how it drives engagement and performance
• How leaders can support wellbeing by helping employees feel safe, connected, cared for, and whole at work
• Specific steps a leader must take to ensure their teams can perform successfully today and in the uncertain future

Can you engage employees and maximize performance at the same time? Isn’t having fun at work counter-productive? Why do I need to recognize employees for simply doing their job? If you wrestle with these questions, you aren’t alone. You’re struggling with the disconnect between an outdated model of management and a new world of work. The time for top down, compliance-based management is over. To attract, retain and unleash great talent for your organization, a new approach is required.

In this powerful keynote, you will learn how successful organizations are unleashing the full potential of their employees by creating a more “human-friendly” work experience. Employee engagement expert, Jason Lauritsen, will reveal how you can more effectively manage performance by making work feel more like a healthy relationship than an unpleasant obligation. You’ll leave the experience inspired, informed and equipped with a new approach for unlocking higher performance that employees will love.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why traditional management practices have failed us
• How work as a contract is being replaced by work as a relationship
• Managing performance is really about creating the right kind of employee experience
• To manage human performance through experience requires planning, cultivation and accountability
• Case studies and examples for how to transform the performance of your team or organization

Becoming a “Best Place to Work” is at the top of many organization’s priority lists. To attract and keep the best talent requires fostering an engaging culture where people want to work. But, building an extraordinary workplace is easier said than done. In fact, it’s hard to even know where to start.

This dynamic session will reveal research-based insights into the what, why and how of building and sustaining a “Best Place to Work” for your employees. And (spoiler alert) it’s not about installing ping pong tables or sleep pods.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand what organizations with exceptional workplaces do differently than others to engage and retain their best talent.
• Discover the common elements found within “Best Places to Work” and what they tell us about how to create the most engaging workplaces.
• Gain practical advice for how to take action within your organization to implement the lessons from “Best Places to Work” in order to increase employee engagement and performance within your own organization.

Work has been defined in many ways over the years: a contract, a transaction, a value exchange. This led to describing humans as capital and designing systems that treat people like assets to be managed and optimized. Is it any wonder that employees’ feeling of engagement within these organizations continues to drop? It doesn’t feel good to be treated like an investment to be maximized.

To reverse this trend requires that we understand what work is for employees, a relationship, and a critically important one. Research has shown us that employees crave the same things from work that they do from other important relationships in their lives: appreciation, connection, acceptance, communication, and support. In this session, we will explore how designing the employee experience through the lens of a healthy relationship will focus your employee engagement efforts for greater impact.

Learning Objectives:

• Deconstruct employee engagement practices to discover why and how the current model is falling short by focusing on maximizing employee discretionary effort.
• Discover that for employees, work is an important relationship and that the work experience should be designed as a relationship for employees rather than as a company process to be optimized.
• Gain a deeper understanding of the elements that make for a healthy relationship and how to use this model to design a more engaging and fulfilling experience for employees at work.

We can all now admit that the annual performance appraisal is a bad process. Employees hate it. Managements hate it. If we are honest, HR hates it too. The process was designed to enforce policies, not motivate performance. No wonder the humans involved don’t like it. And, many of our other performance management processes like one-on-one meetings and 360-degree feedback don’t fare much better.

To make performance management processes more effective and engaging, we must understand that employees experience work as a relationship. Creating human-friendly performance processes means ensuring that the experience builds the relationship instead of damaging it. The process should foster trust and make the employee feel valued and supported. Learn to use the “relationship test” to make your processes more human-friendly.

What you will learn:

• Explore how traditional performance management approaches are flawed because they focus on enforcing compliance rather than motivating behavior
• Learn how to make performance management processes including performance reviews, one-on-one meetings, and 360-degree feedback more human-friendly
• Discover how to use the “relationship test” to redesign processes to be more human-friendly and engaging

Driving innovation can feel overwhelming. Just the idea of innovation is intimidating—as if the big breakthrough is somehow always just beyond our reach. This is fueled by some common misunderstandings about how innovation works. The truth: innovation isn’t about big changes. And it doesn’t even require a big budget, a big title, or any permission. The changes that matter don’t happen overnight, they are the result of a lot of small, meaningful changes over time. Computer programmers and hackers have known this for years and we’ve reaped the technological rewards.

Applying insights from the computer hacking culture, Jason will teach you a simple but incredibly powerful process for hacking your work processes to fuel greater employee engagement. This process will help you and your team to innovate and make progress in your work, one small change at a time. Regardless of your title or experience, you can make big things happen through a series of smart, small changes (hacks).

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will gain a deeper understanding for how change and innovation occurs.
• Participants will learn to use a simple process derived from computer hacking to drive change and progress in their work, regardless of their level or expertise.
• Participants will practice hacking an actual aspect of their work (for example: team meetings, performance appraisals, preparing reports, etc.) and will leave with actionable ideas that can be implemented immediately.