Dr. Laura Hambley

Trends like an ever-changing labour market, ongoing economic and global uncertainty, and increased levels of stress and mental health concerns require organizations to evolve or fail.

Now, more than ever before, it’s crucial for organizations to be intentional about their culture, ensuring that leaders at every level are equipped with the tools to understand, support, and motivate their people within this new human-centric landscape.

Learning Outcomes:

• Gain practical strategies to improve employee engagement and productivity.
• Apply the “3 Cs” to create human-centric cultures.
• Learn keys to attract and retain newer generations of motivated employees.

In today’s rapidly evolving workforce, where four or even five generations are collaborating, understanding the diverse values, motivators, and strengths of each generation is essential. As new generations enter the workforce, leaders face the challenge of building bridges to enhance connection and reduce friction, with Generation Z being no exception. Further, with rising mental health issues and burnout challenges, it’s key for managers to up skill to effectively lead Gen Z.

This engaging and interactive session will provide actionable insights on how to cultivate a culture that fosters commitment, engagement, and well-being in Generation Z.

Learning Outcomes:

• Gain insights into Gen Z’s motivations, well-being, and workplace expectations.
• Discover strategies for fostering a supportive and connected workplace that leverages the strengths of all generations, including Gen Z.
• Recognize and address potential points of friction between
  generations.
• Understand the mental health and work overload challenges at play, and how to best navigate these in general, and specifically with Gen Z.

One thing’s for sure: leading in a hybrid or remote workplace is more challenging, but the extra effort is well worth it!  The benefits of a flexible hybrid work arrangement are many, and well supported by the latest data. This engaging keynote by a 20+ year pioneer on the future of work will explore the keys to leading past resistance and distrust to create a highly productive and engaged remote/hybrid workforce.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand why courage is key to creating a high performing and engaged remote/hybrid workforce.
• Apply key evidence and habits to lead your people when together and apart.
• Explore the key role of trust, and how it can make or break hybrid work success.

Turbulent times continue with a multitude of challenges facing today’s employees and leaders, including high levels of stress, economic uncertainty, polarization and other troubling after-effects of the pandemic. In addition, labor shortages and downsizings have increased the demands on everyone’s shoulders.

This evidence-based presentation will highlight the current mental health situation, explore the warning signs of burnout, and how to both prevent and address burnout in your organization.

Learning Outcomes:

• Identify how mental wellness is on a continuum, and what burnout looks like.
• Understand the top organizational risk factors of employee burnout.
• Learn strategies to begin mitigating these burnout culprits.
• Explore what actions to take when someone (including yourself!) is experiencing burnout.

Turbulent times continue with a multitude of challenges facing employees, including stress, burnout, financial uncertainty, increasing numbers of mental health related concerns, as well as family issues/challenges and global unrest. In addition, labour shortages or downsizings have increased the demands on everyone’s shoulders.

This evidence-based keynote, delivered through the lens of organizational psychology, will share the latest trends and proactive tools to better equip leaders to foster mental wellness in themselves and their people. Topics will include highlighting the current mental health situation, common mental health concerns and how to navigate these challenges and conversations to thrive during these uncertain times.

Learning Outcomes:

• Create a sense of psychological safety and belonging in your organization.
• Learn tips to address and navigate mental health challenges and conversations.
• Apply strategies to create an environment that supports mental and emotional wellbeing at work.

Work is a fundamental part of most of our lives, and work-related stress is prevalent across all industries. As an Industrial/Organizational Psychologist and researcher, Dr. Laura will explore the connections between work stress, burnout, and longevity.

She will discuss what workplaces must do to address burnout culprits, and why managing workplace stress is amental health imperative.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand how chronic work stress and burnout impact health, well-being, and longevity.
• Recognize key organizational and individual factors driving burnout and strategies to address them.
• Explore evidence-based techniques to effectively manage stress at both individual and workplace levels.
• Advocate for workplace policies that support mental health, resilience, and sustainable performance.

Toxic workplaces are unfortunately far too prevalent today. Their common denominator is toxic leadership that, through a series of behaviours, harms employees’ engagement, productivity, and well-being.  The impacts of toxic leadership include high employee turnover, low morale, increased stress and burnout, a fear-based culture, and decreased individual and organizational performance.

This session explores not only the impacts of toxic workplace cultures, but what to do about them. From hiring and promotion practices, to performance and rewards, through to letting go of toxic bosses, will be explored. Participants will leave with insights, tools and inspiration to turn toxic workplaces into healthy ones.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the impacts of toxic leadership on employee engagement, well-being, and organizational performance.
• Identify key drivers of toxic workplace cultures and strategies to address them, including within hiring, promotion, and performance management processes.
• Gain tools and insights to transform toxic workplaces into healthy, high-performing cultures.

Do you wonder why people are leaving your organization? The cause could very well be toxic bosses who are poisoning your culture, with 57% of employees having left at least one job as a result. Toxic bosses take an enormous toll on employees’ mental and physical health, as well as erode productivity, performance, engagement, and commitment.

Dr. Laura will take you on a journey, based on her current organizational psychology research, around how to identify and address toxic leadership in organizations and evaluate your own risk factors for toxic behavior, so that you can move towards a thriving workplace culture.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the key personas and behaviors of toxic bosses, and the latest research about the damage they are inflicting in your organization.
• Identify the warning signs of toxic leaders in the hiring and promotion processes.
• Learn how to proactively identify a toxic boss doing damage in your organization, including the do’s and don’ts of how to deal with these individuals.

One of the best predictors of talent retention is alignment between one’s current position and their career goals. To help support this integration, organizations need to be curious about how they, and their people, define success. Exploring this using “career conversations” is an impactful practice that has been shown to increase employee motivation, commitment, and engagement.

In this interactive, strategy-packed session designed specifically for HR professionals and leaders, participants will leave with practical skills and a clear strategy to effectively implement career conversations into the fabric of their workplaces.

Learning Outcomes:

• Gain insights into the psychological and motivational factors, or “stay levers”, that drive employee engagement and commitment.
• Discover the critical elements of effective career conversations and how to use them to create personalized plans to initiate these critical conversations.
• Learn the four archetypes of employee career development and how each can be leveraged to create alignment of individual goals with organizational objectives.

Trends like an ever-changing labour market, ongoing economic and global uncertainty, and increased levels of stress and mental health concerns add turbulence to our careers and organizations. Catapulting your career means find purpose and fulfillment in your work. This starts with looking inside yourself, and getting clear on You Inc. It also means being healthy on the inside, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Once you are clear and well inside, you have the energy to focus outwards and have a thriving career and life.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the key aspects of “Me Inc.” that drive your career purpose.
• Learn about the power of “career allies” and how to nurture these as catalysts for your career growth; understand the difference between networking and building allies.
• Explore how to do a “career health check” and when to purposefully pivot your career path.