Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Evanta’s 2019 CISO Executive Summit in St. Louis. My talk was titled “AI in 2020: What’s Real, What’s Fake and What’s Next?”

Creating a great culture starts with collecting all the underlying whys.

When speaking with brands on loyalty program strategy, it’s clear companies know they should be gaining consumer insight and personalizing the user experience, but there is often a barrier of hesitation to openly treat customers differently. This hesitancy is rooted in the fear of ostracizing a portion of their consumers who are deemed “less valuable”. Why can’t we simply strive to provide every customer the same high-end treatment that they deserve? Well, because they don’t deserve it.

We have overcome so many challenges in addressing employee engagement. Time was, HR and engagement leaders had to convince the organization of the importance of investing in rewards and recognition, then engagement — and today, holistic solutions have appeared from the possibilities of technological advancement to bring engagement, wellness, rewards, and so many other aspects of workforce management together in one unified platform. It’s a different time.

Editor's Note: Today we welcome our guest, Mollie Lombardi. This is the third and final part in a 3 part series about workplace culture under a microscope. But first, make sure you check out part 1 and part 2.

Whether you realize it or not, leaders set the tone for the corporate culture from the top. While they alone cannot shift or create culture, leaders are one of the most important resources when it comes to: (1) amplifying or starving your organizational culture; and (2) reinforcing organizational norms and expectations. The key to encouraging both of these foundational principles is the often-under-appreciated skill of giving feedback. Aptitude Research has found that when managers are trained in this critical role of giving feedback, there’s much greater alignment around performance expectations as well as organizational culture. 

10 guaranteed, foolproof, effortless ways to take care of your employee engagement and company culture once and for all. Or not.

For the past decade, I’ve been an entrepreneur running creative agencies who never planned to work at corporate again, until last fall when it seemed the perfect time to work at corporate again.

Like many people I begin the day by checking my email, a task which normally includes sifting through no less than 30 emails from retailers vying for my attention. And while some see this as an opportunity to mass-delete, I am excited to begin a new conversation with brands who want to have me as a customer (like most conversations, some are more engaging than others, but that’s a topic for another day).

“If you want one thing too much, it’s likely to be a disappointment,” declares Augustus McRae in Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. “The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things, like soft beds, and buttermilk…a sip of whisky of an evening…”

What’s better than free money? 

Actually, when it comes to reward and recognition programs, quite a few things may be. So says a new study by the Incentive Research Foundation, Award Program Value & Evidence.