Jason Lauritsen

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 You’re struggling with the disconnect between an outdated model of management and a new world of work.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.

Learning Objectives:

• 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

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.

What you will learn:

• 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. Management 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

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.

As the pace of change accelerates, leaders must face the reality that what we’ve always done isn’t working any longer. Innovation is a requirement of survival. And innovation demands disruption.

Knowing disruption is needed is one thing, doing it is another. It requires an ingredient that can be hard to find: Courage. To do the work that will truly make a difference demands that you face your fears of failure and rejection and move beyond them.

In this session, we will confront the most common fears that are holding you back and replace them with the mindset and skill to find your courage.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify key mental obstacles that are holding you back from making a bigger impact
• Explore the nature of courage and how to find more to fuel your work
• Discover some key skills to equip yourself to move past your fear and accomplish breakthrough results