Driving a Culture of Inclusion

A culture of inclusion is one that welcomes encourages everyone to be themselves and that leads employees to feel like they belong…a part of the organization. That means; actively involving every worker’s ideas, knowledge, perspectives, approaches, and styles to maximize business success. This is imperative in the new global business marketplace because companies with diverse employees will deliver the brand promises to changing tastes and preferences of customers. While diversity and inclusion is often policy; it must become a way of life. This presentation will highlight how businesses can focus on showing workers how diversity is part of the day to day employee experience at each touch point.

Learning points:

• Culture–How work gets done at your company: Participants will explore the underpinnings of corporate culture and how the employee experience brings culture to life.
• Diversity, Harassment, and Inclusion: What has made inclusion the imperative in today’s workplace. The speaker will challenge participants to work within their organizations to crive a dulture of inclusion and to introduce methods to help strengthen culture and mold it to align with the identified mission and values of the organization.
• Case studies: Lessons learned from Southwest Airlines and Yahoo
• How to use HR tools to bring a culture of inclusion to life.
• How to build a sustainable and self-replicating culture: Where all employees feel a sense of belonging and contribute to organizational success.

The New Consumer of Work

Business competes for talent today in a free global marketplace in which traditional definitions of job and employee are increasingly outmoded. As a direct result, HR leaders must also change traditional ways of working in order to maintain their central role in the organization of the future.

While many influences are bringing about this change, perhaps the most important is the way in which the worker now approaches and engages with work. Workers today use the sensibilities of consumers to search for overall work experiences that not only provide a sense of connection and fulfillment, but also a part of their personal brands.

Libby’s keynote has an essential message for all HR leaders: You can guide your organization through this competitive marketplace by treating your worker pool more like consumers and less like employees. Think of each phase in the worker life cycle as a branded experience and design your HR programming to deliver this experience. Workers will become more engaged and your organization will be prepared for the impending brain drain likely to occur when as baby boomers retire and disengaged workers head for more meaningful work.

This talk will challenge audience members to:

• Establish a team at the top with Marketing, Communications and Business operations to create the right worker experience at each stage of the employment life cycle
• Consider the both needs of the business and sensibilities of workers to meet changing business requirements
• Become an organization that creates strong connections with its prospective talent pool and a reputation for providing a great worker experience.

Cracking the Culture Code

Companies and the business media tout corporate culture as the underpinning of corporate success. In turn, culture is often seen as the reason for corporate failure. The difficulty with attributing business success or failure to culture is that sweeping statements about the workplace experience are traditionally based solely on anecdotal evidence. Most CEO’s talk to employees and investors about culture and, although motivational, it is rarely one of the top priorities for the organization.

So, it is not surprising that discussions around culture fade into the background along with other “soft” concerns; however, these are precisely the critical issues that determine the organization’s destiny; like selecting a senior executive, considering a merger or acquisition, or implementation of a major change initiative.

The good news is that culture doesn’t have to be anecdotal. This presentation will challenge the audience and introduce methods to strengthen culture and mold it to align with the identified mission and values on company’s lobby walls as follows:

• Redefining the Culture Initiative
• Ten steps to align Culture
• Establishing a Culture Baseline
• Guiding senior leadership to aspirational culture
• Overcoming obstacles
• Getting Started

Re-imagine HR: How to accelerate HR and Organizations to thrive in the future social and work ecosystem

The CHRO role has become one of the most important roles on the executive leadership team. Human Resources has been elevated to the C-Suite and with that increase in status has come increased pressure to perform.. Today’s HR leaders must adapt to and address the demands of an increasingly diverse and demanding workforce, globalization, stricter regulatory requirements, increased accountability to the CEO and Board of Directors, and the complexity of leading the HR function with often limited resources. Based on the recent collaborative work with CHREATE (The Global Consortium to Reimagine HR, Employment Alternatives) and recent books edited by Sartain containing views from over a 100 CHRO’s, the speaker will offer her most current thinking on the evolving role of the CHRO.

The presentation will explore:

• The forces of change driving the evolution work and HR
• The role of HR and the CHRO in today’s environment and new roles for the future.
• New ways to think about work and how it is performed
• The importance of top talent and how to influence your organization to make it a top priority
• How to influence and shape expectations of HR’s constituents.

Ageism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, and What to Do About It

With five generations working side by side, it’s more important than ever to be aware of unconscious (or conscious) age bias in the workforce. With the large Baby Boom generation aging, and the war for talent heating up, companies can no longer afford to overlook mature workers. Building a multigenerational workforce yields a stronger pipeline of talent, protects business continuity and taps into new resources to address labor shortages. In this session, AARP Vice Chair Libby Sartain will share the latest strategies and insights for effectively leveraging the unique talents of these older workers.

Workplace Application – The combination of looming labor shortages and the aging of the workforce mean that organizations need to think outside the box when it comes to attracting and retaining great talent. In addition to the strategic advantage of recruiting this often overlooked talent pool, leveraging the strengths of your existing experienced workers can yield dividends in the areas of engagement, workforce stability, and cognitive diversity.

Brand For Talent

Brand for Talent will highlight how organizations must build a talent brand in order to attract their most critical talent segments to come to work. In just the past few years the marketplace for talent has fundamentally changed, partly because the needs of business have changed, partly because the availability of technology has changed how workers and business connect. Today business competes for talent in a free global marketplace in which traditional definitions of job and employee no longer relate. People looking for work have fundamentally changed.

• Today’s worker, Gen Y to Baby Boomer no longer merely seeks or evaluates a task to complete or a job to do. The workers searches for an overall work experience that will provide a sense of connection and fulfillment beyond the immediate work at hand and outside the traditional definitions of opportunity and security.
• All of this change makes the brand the most essential part of an organization’s strategy to secure talent.
• The change in the marketplace for talent, and in the consumer of the work experience, demand that business look at brand in a new way.