The Human-Centered Workplace: Establishing Belonging Through Authenticity, Collaboration, and Respect

Our world has changed, and it’s important for your organization to reflect these changes. By being aware of those around you, showing respect, and appreciating both individuals and their unique qualities, you’ll create the right environment to foster true belonging.

Workplaces are increasingly disconnected. It is vital that individuals feel authentic, valued for their contributions, and a strong sense of connection and community . Leaders must build these environments when their plates are already full.

Devin will offer research-backed strategies for building an inclusive mindset, implementing best practices, and creating a work environment where people feel like they truly belong. He will explore the role our identities play at work and how we can develop empathy and understanding for others’ experiences.

In this session, you will:

• Learn more about organizations’ unique role in creating places of belonging and encouraging authentic connections.
• Explore the latest research to understand workforce trends and dive into what it means for employees to be connected.
• Learn the specific actions necessary to create a culture of connection and belonging.

Inclusion Starts With Conversations: Strategies for Building Conversational Cultures

Conversations about race, work, and family can be challenging, but avoiding them is not an option. Don't let fear hold you back from the conversations that matter. Your business depends on courageous communication that fosters understanding and growth. Learn the “PER”fect Framework for engaging in courageous conversations, so you can build a culture of inclusivity and trust. Discover how to start, what to say, and how to handle difficult situations, and leave with the tools you need to cultivate conversational cultures.

In this session, you will:

• Recognize the critical role of and evaluate the impact of inclusive conversational cultures on business success.
• Discover strategies and techniques for starting, steering, and handling conversations on sensitive topics.
• Master the “PER”fect Framework for engaging in difficult conversations.

Speaker: Kelly Charles-Collins, Speaker Moguls
Track: Culture

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How Being Trauma Informed Can Help You Elevate Your Workforce

Not being trauma informed diminishes our ability to elevate our workforce. Mounting neuroscience research indicates that past psychological trauma impedes current employees’ ability to operate at a high level. And, this is no small issue, as it has been reported that 70 percent of adults have experienced significant trauma. When organizational developers understand the trauma-to-effectiveness relationship, they can develop trauma-informed practices that not only improve the well-being of their employees, but also improve the effectiveness of those employees and the organization’s culture. Learn cutting-edge research on the trauma-to-effectiveness relationship to help elevate your workforce.

In this session, you will:

• Better meet employees’ emotional needs to unlock elevated effectiveness.
• Accelerate the development of the emotional aptitudes of your employees.
• Implement more profound and trauma-informed culture-improvement practices.

Speaker: Ryan Gottfredson, California State University, Fullerton
Track: Mental Wellness; Emotional Well-Being in the Workplace

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One-Group-All: A Holistic Approach to Leadership Development

According to Gallup research, up to 70 percent of differences in employee engagement can be attributed to managers. Whether they lead from the front or encourage from behind, leaders are role models, vision keepers, and performance coaches. But how are we investing in them—ensuring they have the guidance and growth to succeed? This session reimagines leadership development as a three-pronged strategy: Prong 1—one-to-one—invests in leaders through coaching. Prong 2—one-to-group—upskills leaders through training. Prong 3—one-to-all—reimagines and aligns talent processes and practices. This interactive event will help you create a holistic vision for leadership development—and jump-start successful implementation.

In this session, you will:

• Identify the benefits of coaching for leaders and learn how to measure the results.
• Describe how training supports and is supported by coaching to holistically improve leadership development.
• Identify talent development processes that influence or are influenced by leadership development.

Speaker: Tina Robinson, WorkJoy
Track: Leadership and Employee Development

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Retention is the name of the game right now. Understanding that people often leave managers, not organizations, how do we equip managers without crushing them with an unrealistic burden? If leaders don’t understand the impact of their current behavior, know the unique needs of their employees, or establish mutually beneficial outcomes, how can we expect them to retain employees? To solve this, we must consider some often-overlooked factors. Join this session to learn a hidden truth about adaptive capacity and its power to retain employees through effective leadership.

In this session you will:

• Use engagement and retention trends over the last two to three years and important statistical data to help shape future human capital strategy.
• Grasp the significance of paradox theory for adaptive leadership potential.
• Understand the leadership imperative related to employee retention.

Speaker: Reid Tolley, SHRM-SCP, CMC and Collin George, MBA, Talent Matters LLC

Building Connections From Day One: Activities for Integrating New Hires

Integrating new hires into a team is tricky.

Employee onboarding usually focuses heavily on company policies and processes and on getting the new hire up to speed on their role and responsibilities, which are certainly critical. Too often, though, it’s left up to chance whether and when new employees start forming connections with their colleagues.

In this highly interactive session, you’ll learn a few simple, free activities that you can lead to help team members—both in-person and distributed—get to know one another better. By helping new employees form these connections early, you’ll set them up for higher levels of engagement, improved performance, and longer retention from day one.

In this session, you will:

• Design effective team bonding sessions for integrating new hires into in-person and distributed teams.
• Lead engaging activities to catalyze connections between new and existing employees.

Speaker: Alex Suchman and Peter Williamson, Barometer XP
Track: Onboarding and Retention

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Engagement Through Change—Talent Development’s Role in Thriving Through Change

Robust change methodology typically includes elements associated with addressing organizational readiness, leader engagement, and individual resistance. These elements generally occur during the planning phase of a change effort. Research from client engagement surveys before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic reveals additional factors that play critical roles in change adoption. While traditional change practices take place during the effort itself, these additional elements can be heavily influenced before significant change, increasing the effectiveness of the transformation effort. In this interactive session, practitioners will learn what these elements are and practical tactics for influencing each in advance of their next change effort.

In this session, you will:

• Understand the role of employee engagement in effective organizational change efforts.
• Learn about key areas where talent development can affect employee engagement to drive change adoptions.
• Explore tactical actions you can take to build employee engagement both during and in advance of change.

Speaker: Cheryl Jackson and Annie McManus, GP Strategies
Track: Change Management

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Are You an Innovation and Inclusion Incubator or Impediment?

There’s nothing new about innovation, but innovation is always new. In this moment of digital expansion, rapid globalization, and recovery from the last few tumultuous years, it’s difficult to talk about innovation without also talking about inclusion. Drawing on pop culture and historical context across decades, from Charlie Chaplin to Apple TV’s Severance, and leaning on research and data, this session provides a blueprint for maximizing innovation practices to achieve greater inclusivity and organizational success. During the session, you will assess your ecosystem of inclusion and explore (with curiosity and humor) what it means to be an incubator for innovation and inclusion.

In this session, you will:

• Summarize the importance of the intersection between innovation and inclusion.
• Analyze your own ecosystem of inclusion and create an ecosystem map.
• Define your own conditions for incubating innovation and inclusion.

Speaker: April Hennessey, The Ken Blanchard Companies
Track: DEI

We often use the word wellness without necessarily agreeing on what it means, which can make things tricky. In this wellness break, we’ll cover various dimensions of wellness and how to be clear about which one(s) you’re discussing. And most importantly, we’ll move beyond the conversation to experience and share some simple exercises and resources to use in both your OD work and your personal life.

Speaker: Catherine Corey

A Coach Approach for Leading at Any Level

Coaching can be an effective strategy to improve communication, productivity, and performance at all levels of an organization. You don’t have to be a professional coach to employ coaching strategies. This session will show you how to use coaching skills in your daily work as a manager, leader, or employee. Participants will leave with a better understanding of what coaching is, how to utilize coaching in their own leadership, and additional resources for continued learning.

In this session, you will:

• Learn to apply coaching skills in your daily work.
• Understand how to enhance your communication skills using a coach approach.
• Implement an action plan to develop your coaching skills.

Speaker: Lucas M. Davis and Alli Lake, International Coaching Federation
Track: Coaching and Mentoring

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Crafting a Powerful Hybrid Employee Experience

The ability to craft an engaging employee experience in an ever-evolving world of work is a leader’s most powerful capability. In this action-oriented session, you’ll learn the four drivers of an engaging employee experience and best practices you can implement immediately to boost retention and engagement with your team.

In this session, you will:

• Discover which elements of the employee experience are currently serving you and where your quick-hit opportunities lie.
• Identify and implement short-term experiments to quickly learn what works.
• Engage your team in a collaborative process to craft the experience most meaningful to them.

Speaker: Rachel Cooke, Lead Above Noise
Track: Employee Experience and Engagement

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Launching a Leadership Development Program on a Budget

How do you roll out a robust leadership development program with limited bandwidth and resources? Outsourced training can feel canned, but who has time to build content from scratch? The speaker will share key learnings, inexpensive resources, and an effective approach to leadership development based on her 12 years of experimentation with different approaches. This session will include a case study of recent leadership programs facilitated by the speaker, lessons learned, and inexpensive resources. In small groups, attendees can also share best practices and start filling in a framework for their own leadership development programs.

In this session, you will:

• Produce a template for a year-long internal leadership development program.
• Share crowdsourced leadership development best practices and budget-friendly resources and tools.

Speaker: Sarah Sprott, Candid
Track: Leadership and Employee Development

Wrap up today's experience at ATD OrgDev in this session with all attendees.

The Connected Culture: A Revolutionary Approach to Cultural Shift in Organizations

This panel brings together leaders who have successfully navigated cultural shifts to create environments of collaboration, emotional intelligence, and productivity. They will share a revolutionary approach to cultural shifts, where emotional intelligence, attachment science, and meaningful relationships drive organizational success to create a connected culture that cultivates employee well-being, boosts productivity, and fosters a positive and thriving work environment.

In this session, you will:

• Build internal relationships to cultivate belonging and drive employee engagement.
• Use attachment science to encourage growth and development and promote a sense of psychological safety that fosters trust and loyalty.
• Create a supportive leadership style that prioritizes emotional support, encourages open dialogue, and empowers employees.

Speakers:
Lola Gershfeld, PsyD
Rocky Bandzeladze, EdD
Amanda Wickramasinghe, EdD, PhD

Join us for this rejuvenating wellness break to recharge your attention. Step away from your screens and immerse yourself in a series of activities that promote relaxation and mental clarity. You can expect a series of short, simple, neuroscience-based exercises to help you restore focus so you are better equipped to engage with the upcoming sessions. This will allow you to absorb information more effectively and contribute meaningfully to discussions. No specific preparation is needed.

Speaker: Anastasia Dedyukhina

Digital Well-Being: Let’s Fight the “Always On” Culture

Have you or your employees experienced feeling constantly overwhelmed or found it hard to focus online? Perhaps you struggle to disconnect or have FOMO, Zoom fatigue, or undiagnosed anxiety after scrolling through Facebook? This interactive session will use the latest neuroscience research and case studies from around the world to discuss the impact our devices have on our emotional and mental wellness. You will learn ways to measure digital well-being using an evidence-based approach and neuroscience-based tips for identifying early signs of digital burnout. You’ll be able to use this information to help employees find a balance between online and offline lives.

In this session, you will:

• Understand the effect of tech overuse on different aspects of mental and physical health, well-being, focus, and productivity.
• Get neuroscience-based practical tips for introducing a more balanced use of tech in your own or your employees’ lives.
• Learn to measure digital well-being (DW) and risk stratify employees with high, medium, and low DW levels.

Speaker: Anastasia Dedyukhina, Consciously Digital
Track: Mental Wellness; Emotional Well-Being in the Workplace

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Build a Culture of Belonging to Increase Talent Engagement

The hybrid/remote work environment and rapid infusion of tech into the workplace have diluted human connection, reducing our sense of belonging. Yet belonging is essential for effective leadership. Individuals need to feel leveraged, valued, and celebrated for who they are and for the unique value they offer. Leaders who foster a culture of belonging inspire their people to deliver exceptional value at work every day. When employees feel they belong, engagement and retention increase. Job performance also increases, by 56 percent (BetterUp). In this session, you’ll learn what true belonging feels like and why self-awareness is the first step in building a culture where people feel they belong. You’ll leave with action steps you can take immediately.

In this session, you will:

• Assess your culture’s belonging quotient using a nine-point checklist.
• Explore ways to inspire your leaders to increase the sense of belonging at your organization.
• Learn how to expand awareness of self and others among your leaders and teammates.

Speaker: William Arruda, CareerBlast.TV
Track: Employee Experience and Engagement

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Building DEI Strategies in a Transforming Environment

The effectiveness of diversity, equity, and inclusion interventions is being challenged in the current environment. This session will help DEI professionals effectively build sustainable initiatives for their organizations. The speaker will explain the steps needed to define the organizational issue, determine focus areas, design interventions, manage change, and evaluate progress.

In this session, you will:

• Apply the organization development process to build sustainable and effective interventions.
• Learn to assess and diagnose your organization to develop priorities aligned with the overall strategy.
• Learn to measure the success of interventions by identifying metrics relevant to the initiative.

Speaker: Morgan Blount
Track: DEI

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Changing Horses Midstream—Facilitating Hybrid Leadership Transitions

Leadership changes can be challenging at the best of times. When the team is hybrid, split between in-person and remote, integrating a new leader into a group can be almost impossible. In this session, you will learn how a government agency moved quickly to create a facilitated leadership transition process to support bringing new leaders into hybrid teams. This leadership transition process helps leaders hit the ground running with their teams. It also allows the teams to overcome their uncertainty about their new leader and strengthen their relationships in a hybrid environment. The speaker will share tools, activities, and approaches that you can use to add the hybrid leadership transition workshop to your toolbox.

In this session, you will:

• Learn to design and lead a hybrid leadership transition workshop.
• Understand how to facilitate a leadership conversation around norms and expectations with a hybrid team.
• Learn to help leaders create leadership philosophies to share during a hybrid leadership transition.

Speaker: William Whetstine, USDA/APHIS
Track: Change Management

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How Decision Making Can Become a Lever for Organizational Change

Your company culture is defined by how you make decisions. How is authority shared—or not? How are different perspectives included—or not? Over time, decision-making patterns become customs.

If you don’t make an intentional effort to improve decision making, your default approach will pull your company toward risk aversion, bureaucracy, and inequity. But if you thoughtfully design and practice better decision making, you can catalyze a culture of innovation, agility, equity, and inclusion.

In this session, you’ll get hands-on practice with simple but powerful decision-making tools that you can introduce to your teams to help decision making become a powerful lever for creating positive organizational change.

In this session, you will:

• Express and articulate the importance of decision making as part of an agile, innovative, and inclusive culture.
• Diagnose decision-making moments that are falling into consensus-seeking or command and control.
• Apply the new decision-making tool Safe to Try to complex, cross-functional decisions.

Speaker: Alexis Gonzales-Black, August Public
Track: Culture

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Reimagining Employee Onboarding: A Persona and Design Thinking Approach

This interactive learning session will reimagine employee onboarding using personas and design thinking. Whether you’re a seasoned learning and talent development professional or just getting started, this session will provide practical insights and strategies to create a best-in-class onboarding experience for your organization. During this 60-minute session, the speaker will dive into his experience reimagining employee onboarding and share the results. Participants will have the opportunity to engage in hands-on activities and discussions to apply the concepts to their own organizations.

In this session, you will:

• Apply design thinking to create onboarding that aligns with the organization’s culture and goals.
• Analyze the benefits and challenges of using personas to personalize onboarding.

Speaker: David Jackson, HealthPoint
Track: Onboarding and Retention

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How Southwest Airlines Is Shaping Leaders for the Future

This session will take a 30,000-foot view of how Southwest Airlines assessed, designed, and created initial leadership development and recurrent leadership development programs to shape leaders for the future. Come prepared to hear stories of success in these new programs. This session is for you if you are considering revamping a current leadership program or want ideas to get started creating a new one. Come see how to make learning a habit!

In this session, you will:

• Apply processes to create new initial and recurrent leadership development programs.
• Be able to return to your job inspired by success stories.

Speaker: Colette Williamson, Southwest Airlines Company
Track: Culture

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Internal Team Coaches—Embedded Facilitators for Every Team

Hiring external team coaches has proven to be expensive and unsustainable in most cases. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has therefore embarked on an experiment to train qualified staff as internal team coaches for their own offices. The organization operates in 140 countries, and this session describes how it identified, trained, and accompanied internal team coaches on their initial journeys. Each country’s context is different, and the organization could position internal team coaches as facilitators of continuous improvement and change alongside managers. This session will discuss the many challenges faced as well as numerous success stories from this promising approach.

In this session, you will:

• Learn to leverage internal staffing resources for internal team coaching.
• Understand how to design and run internal team coach selection and highly adaptable training programs.
• Learn to integrate internal team coaching with general continuous improvement in your organization.

Speaker: Markus Voelker, United Nations Population Fund
Track: Coaching and Mentoring

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Wellness at Work and the Case for Corporate Care

COVID-19 dramatically exposed the importance of employee well-being for a healthy, resilient workforce. This session will introduce a five-pillared employee well-being framework to make the case for corporate care. Using a wellness initiative as a case study, the speaker will share simple strategies to launch an organizational wellness initiative, leveraging a three-pronged approach: communication, external opportunities, and internal change agents. Participants will leave the session equipped with a holistic framework for supporting organizational employee well-being, data to gain leadership buy-in for corporate care, and a working plan for launching an organizational wellness initiative.

In this session, you will:

• Be equipped with both current data and key ROI metrics to make the case for corporate care to senior leaders.
• Obtain a tangible wellness initiative template that outlines resources and free, sustainable strategies to launch a wellness initiative.
• Receive a step-by-step guide for launching a corporate podcast focused on wellness using free, accessible software like MS Teams and SharePoint.

Speaker: Jessica Abshire
Track: Mental Wellness; Emotional Well-Being in the Workplace

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OD’s Role in Culture Transformation: The Culture Equation

Change doesn’t have to be hard, if you have the right equation: how to be an OD leader in culture transformation.

In this keynote, Jessica Kriegel, PhD, presents original research done in partnership with Stanford that demonstrates how you can drive significant growth in revenue through culture change. With data science, case studies, and humor, she presents an engaging and practical four-step process to drive transformation using The Culture Equation.

In this session, you will:

• An understanding of the three quantifiable variables critical to driving real change
• Four steps to lead change in your own teams either as a leader or individual contributor
• A roadmap to take the first steps in becoming a champion of The Culture Equation

We attend events like OrgDev to connect with industry leaders and peers and gain practical skills and real-world strategies to apply directly to our organization’s challenges. But what happens once we leave? Do we reflect on how we can implement what we’ve learned and found exciting? In our busy day-to-day, it’s challenging to bring those good intentions to life. That’s where this session comes in. Facilitated by OrgDev thought leaders, this session will help you embrace the power of reflective pause and connect your learning experience with possibilities in your work. This time of pause lays the foundation for your success post-OrgDev, bringing greater clarity before you chart your strategy in tomorrow’s action-planning session.

Speakers: Tonya Wilson, Sy Islam, and LaKisha Brooks

Engage with your peers and thought leaders in a conversation about the future of organization development and its role in today’s organizations. How can we effectively integrate organization development into our initiatives, and what are some examples that will shape success both now and in the future? Come ready to discuss current and emerging trends identified throughout the conference. We will explore your insights and questions in this panel discussion.

Speakers: Sy Islam, Holly Wilson, LaKisha Brooks, Tonya Wilson, and Catherine Corey

Back by popular demand, this session will help close out OrgDev with maximum impact. One essential part of attending a conference is meeting new people and expanding your network with fresh perspectives. This session provides an opportunity to build on the information you collected during and after each session you attended and to maximize the collective wisdom in the room. Together with OrgDev thought leaders, you’ll develop a roadmap that combines OrgDev’s common themes with best practices and real-world expertise. Come prepared to share ideas you’ve been mulling over and strengthen your understanding by learning from other people’s experiences. The session’s unique interactive format will provide engagement opportunities for everyone. You’ll leave with clear next steps tailored to your unique needs that will not only support your teams and everyday work but also help continue that feeling of renewal long after you leave Las Vegas.

Speakers: Sy Islam and LaKisha Brooks