Expert on Employee Engagement
Program Titles
- Leading through Compassion in the Future of Work
- The Relationship Comes First: Discovering the True Path to Employee Engagement
- Unlocking High Performance: How to Engage and Empower Employees to Reach Their Full Potential
- Being the Best: The Surprising Secret to Building a Best Place to Work
- Hacking Work: Big Change Starts with Thinking Small
- DYSFUNCTIONAL WORK RELATIONSHIP
Jason Lauritsen transforms management and liberates managers from outdated and inhumane practices to cultivate human potential at work and improve people’s lives. His insights have been described as a “secret weapon” by leaders who strive to create a more engaging and human work experience.
When Work Feels Like a Healthy Relationship, Performance and Engagement Are Unlocked.
He’s known for his authentic and vulnerable storytelling that challenges your group to see things differently. It’s nearly impossible to come away from an interaction with Jason without having your perspective on management changed.
Jason’s passion for fixing management, fueled by his relentless curiosity about human behavior and a series of terrible job experiences over the decades, galvanized his commitment to finding a better way. His experience ranges from startup CEO to Fortune 1000 executive.
Leading through Compassion in the Future of Work
Amidst the disruption of a global pandemic, it was revealed that the old way of working is no longer relevant. Our imperative was to reinvent when, where, and how work happens quickly. We are never going back to the old way. This new work landscape requires managers and leaders to be more engaged with their people than ever. Today and in the future, the managers who can best support employee well-being will be those who thrive.
At the heart of well-being is ensuring your people feel cared about as a person–not just for their work output. This can feel uncomfortable and isn’t a natural skill for most of us. Plus, it’s not something found in most management training programs. But it can be learned, and it starts with developing compassion. When managers bring compassion to their jobs, they better understand what their people genuinely need to offer their full potential at work.
You will learn:
- Why leading for well-being requires compassion
- An understanding of the four components of compassion
- How managers can use compassion to foster employee well-being and performance
Over the years, work has been defined in many ways: a contract, transaction, and value exchange between workers and employers. Many organizations even refer to employees as “Human Capital” and treat them like assets to be managed and optimized. Is it any wonder that employee engagement continues dropping as employees dream of finding a better workplace? It turns out that we don’t like to be treated like an investment to be maximized.
If we hope to get the best out of our people, it starts with understanding what work is for employees–a relationship. Research has shown that employees crave the same things from work as they do from any meaningful relationship: appreciation, acceptance, communication, commitment, and support. This session will explore how managers and leaders can invite employees to be their best by making work feel more like a healthy relationship.
You will learn:
- Discover why many standard management practices are failing to engage employees
- Learn that for employees, work is one of the most important relationships in their lives (and it needs to be treated that way)
- Gain a deeper understanding of the elements that create a healthy relationship and how to use this insight to create a more engaging and fulfilling experience for your people at work.
Unlocking High Performance: How to Engage and Empower Employees to Reach Their Full Potential
Can you engage employees and maximize performance at the same time? Isn’t having fun at work counterproductive? Why do I need to recognize employees for simply doing their jobs? If you wrestle with these questions, you aren’t alone. You’re struggling with the disconnect between an outdated management model and a new world of work. The time for top-down, compliance-based management is over. A new approach is required to attract, retain, and unleash great talent for your organization.
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. Jason 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.
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
- Maintaining human performance through experience requires planning, cultivation, and accountability
- Case studies and examples of 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. Attracting and keeping the best talent requires fostering an engaging culture where people want to work. But building an extraordinary workplace is easier said than done. It’s hard even to 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 on implementing the lessons from “Best Places to Work” within your organization to increase employee engagement and performance.
Hacking Work: Big Change Starts with Thinking Small
Driving innovation can feel overwhelming. 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 is that innovation isn’t about significant changes. And it doesn’t even require a big budget, title, or permission. The changes that matter don’t happen overnight; they result from many 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 compelling process for hacking your management and work processes to fuel greater engagement and performance. This will help you and your team innovate and progress, one small change at a time. Regardless of your title or experience, you can make big things happen through intelligent, small changes (or hacks).
Learning Objectives:
- Gain a deeper understanding of how change and innovation occur.
- Learn to use a simple process derived from computer hacking to drive change and progress in their work, regardless of their level or expertise.
- Practice hacking an actual aspect of your work (for example, team meetings, performance conversations, reports, etc.), and it will leave you with actionable ideas that can be implemented immediately.
It’s not AI that we’re struggling with. It’s the uncertainty.
How we respond to the uncertainty could shape the future of work (and our lives) for a generation.
So what does that mean for you? Here are a few of the themes and calls to action I heard several times this week that I feel are most helpful.
- Embrace reality and lose the judgment. AI is here. The genie is out of the bottle. How you feel about AI is irrelevant because it will be a part of our lives now. AI isn’t good or bad; it just exists. What you do with it will be either good or bad. Choose wisely.
- Get educated. Way too many of us (hand-raised) are forming opinions about AI while not knowing much about it. The less you know, the more opportunity for uncertainty and assumption to run rampant. Use your curiosity and go on a learning journey. If you haven’t, play (yes, I mean play) with the free tools like ChatGPT and Claude. The more you know, the better equipped you will be to lead the conversation and make decisions about these tools.
- Know the risks and work to mitigate them. In a conversation I had at the event, someone who has studied a lot of AI-enhanced products on the market commented to me, “What AI does best currently is take bad, biased processes and make them go faster as scale.” AI is not a magic bullet, and it’s riddled with issues. Humans are biased by nature. AI tools today are programmed by humans, and they create value using human-generated data, so they are also inherently biased. The only way to eliminate that bias is through intentional efforts, oversight, and design.
- Get conformable when in uncertainty. Things aren’t going to slow down or get less uncertain
anytime soon, ever. We cannot be shackled by fear when faced with uncertainty. Instead, we need to channel our curiosity and ask better questions. Get curious about the future implications of current decisions. Ask questions that force you (and others) to play out how an action today will affect the future in both positive and negative ways.
Jason is growing increasingly optimistic about the potential of AI as a catalyst of positive change at work.
The future has not been written. So beware of the clickbait headlines warning of the impending AI takeover. They are simply playing on your fears and uncertainty. The future of AI will be what we make it or what we allow it to be.
So get in the game. Sitting on the sidelines is not an option on this one.
Books by Jason Lauritsen
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