The Leaders Lounge Event, New York

Last week I attended and spoke at the Leaders Lounge event in New York. The theme for the event revolved around the strength of an enterprise is only as sustainable as the people-strategy.

The event had 80-100 senior people-practitioners (Head of, to C-Level) that came together to unpack and rebuild areas where we are seeing a need to challenge previous models relating to the talent value proposition and organizational structure.

Employees are the new consumer

The morning started with a high-octane session from Peter Bingman, CMO of DailyPay. In his session, Employees are the new consumer, Peter implores us to answer one question …

Does the program help me solve my problem?

It’s a simple question and if the answer to the question is a “Yes” - then you have a happy & engaged individual. However, the tricky part is that this question will obviously have multiple answers and the answer will change over a period of time for the same individual as she grows in her career.

✔️ Did you know? $75,000 is the income people need to be “engaged and happy”.

Future Talent Value Proposition

Moderated by Susan Vitale, CMO of iCIMS - the panel touched upon examples of how each of the companies represented had looked at Employee Engagement and Culture building in this hybrid world. Here are some of the quotable quotes from the session.

Here are some of the nuggets from the session…

Onboarding is super important in building company culture

Nicolette Sherman, CHRO at Certara

In March 2020, GroupM went from 120 offices worldwide to 36,000 offices worldwide

Marie-Claire Barker, Global CPO at GroupM

Post the acquisition, we had to double down on our culture to move ahead and go past all challenges of integration

Tara John, VP HR at TD Bank

HR was a cost pre-COVID

Jeffrey Bowman, CEO & CoFounder at Reframe

Building trust is really important before the first day of work.

Marie-Claire Barker, Global CPO at GroupM

The Secret of Onboarding

I had the pleasure of presenting some of my learnings from Tydy and the theme of my session was to help everyone realize that they are sitting on a treasure trove of data that should be harnessed to deliver a 10x experience at the workplace.

I presented real life examples and case studies on how data was harnessed for personalized Journeys to personalized processes, communication and insights.

If you would like to get a hold of the presentation, feel free to message me and I will be more than happy to share the deck with all the examples listed.

Wellbeing and Employee Experience

This session run by Karen Frost at Alight was a great eye-opener for a lot of us. Alight conducted a study to understand benefits and their relationship to EX and most employees felt that their benefits were inaccessible and unaffordable.

A simple example: They might have access to doctors - but taking time off from work to go see the doctor was the practical challenge and made it impossible to take advantage of the benefit.

Karen talked about the need for employers to really start looking at the personalization of benefits at an individual level and that the concept of a LifeStyle Account - where a pre-set amount of money is deposited for each worker is becoming a reality sooner than expected.

Resolving the paradoxes of Belonging at Work

For sure the most thought provoking and reflective session was the one by Paul Gimenez, Head of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at The Guitar Center Company.

We all have a very strong negative bias and that is something we are born with - but it’s obvious for survival - you better be scared of the sabre tooth lion versus the field of dandelions. We are all wired to be wary of the unknown and this is what brings about the bias we live with every day in our personal and professional lives.

My key takeaway from the session was that we should

Make diversity feel like home.

The End

Once again, I would like to thank the Leaders Lounge team for inviting me to speak and attend the event. It was insightful and I got to meet some really inspirational people leaders who I intend to keep in touch with and learn from more 😊