Making Work Suck Less By Fixing Broken HR Systems

How confident are you in your current HR practices and leadership team to adapt to these tumultuous times? If the answer isn't a resounding yes, then your HR systems may be broken. What about your HR approach seems antiquated? If we believe employees don't quit jobs, they quit their bosses, what have you done to improve the quality of your leaders? How is HR helping to grow the next generation of leaders that have a strong EQ foundation to manage a growing Gen Z workforce? The next generation of workers do not see an emotionally intelligent manager as a bonus, but a requirement to stay

Cultivating Teams as Brand Ambassadors

There are three ways nations become wealthy: tapping natural resources, having access to cheap labor, and/or incentivizing its people to innovate and create new ways of doing things. The same goes for businesses.

In order to maintain a competitive edge, a company must secure a loyal customer base that will continue to buy its products or services on a consistent basis, regardless of market fluctuations. While there are numerous ways to achieve competitive advantage, the end goal is always the same: give the customers what they want and for a price they are willing to pay. If you lose your customers, nothing else matters. This is the essence of business. Bud Light is Exhibit A on this point.

Naturally, one may ask:

• How exactly does a company secure a customer base?
• How does it grow its base?
• How does it maintain its base?

Enter organizational teams.

Employees are a company’s most important and valuable resource for creating and maintaining competitive advantage. They, not the C-Suite, have their ears on the ground and are directly engaged with the public online and offline. They acquire an enormous amount of knowledge about the marketplace just by showing up to work. And, when they leave, all of that knowledge walks right out the door. But, it need not be that way.

When you attend this presentation, you will learn:

1. What intellectual property is and why it matters to your company.
2. What a strong intellectual property culture looks like and how to build it.
3. How to make the culture contagious across teams.

About Jeff Harry

Jeff Harry combines positive psychology and play to heal workplaces, help teams build psychological safety and assist individuals in addressing their biggest challenges through embracing a play-oriented approach to work. Jeff was selected by BambooHR & Engagedly as one of the Top 100 HR Influencers and has been featured in the NY Times, Mashable, Upworthy, Shondaland, & Wired. Jeff has worked with Google, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Adobe, the NFL, Amazon, and Facebook, helping their staff to infuse more play into the day-to-day. While we spend most of our time pretending to be important, serious grownups, it's when we let go of that facade and just play, that the real magic happens. Fully embracing your own nerdy genius — whatever that is — gives you the power to make a difference and change lives. 

About Samm Smeltzer

Samm has playfully been referred to as the “Unicorn”, this comes from her eternal optimism for the possibilities of what the workplace could be. For the last decade, Samm has passionately pursued a journey to discover the missing elements for employee engagement within organizations. This path has primarily led her to studies in Spirituality and Eastern Medicine, discovering how much of a role having a professional purpose and passion is essential to employees.

About Kelly Keller

Kelley Keller is an intellectual property (IP) lawyer, speaker, and legal and business educator with nearly 30 years of experience in the IP field. Most recently, Kelley worked with entrepreneurs and businesses in a wide variety of industries helping them transform their ideas, knowledge, creativity, and innovation into valuable business assets that fuel growth and drive profits. She is a frequent lecturer and speaker on a wide variety of legal topics to legal, business, and student audiences.

Kelley also teaches companies how to build and grow a pro-intellectual property culture within their organizations that allows them to leverage their most valuable and important business asset: their people.