Jason's Blog
Compassion: A New Management Imperative – Part 1
This content was originally posted on the Workhuman blog. You can find the orginal post here. As the summer of 2020 was wrapping up, I knew something wasn’t right. Despite the fact that I’d somehow miraculously pivoted my business after the pandemic had struck and...
YOU Are The Change You Are Waiting For
I’m not sure how or why it happened. I’ve always had a high capacity for trusting other people, often before I have any idea if they are trustworthy. I can probably credit my parents and grandparents for that, plus a bit of luck early in my life. But regardless of...
Who tells YOU when you are being a JERK?
This week, while I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Armchair Expert, their guest shared a story about how someone had told him that he was being a jerk. In this case, he had earned it (you listen to the episode if you’d like to hear the whole story, it’s...
My Birthday Wish for 2022
It’s my birthday this weekend. Everyone has a little different relationship with their birthday. Some embrace it and welcome the attention (thanks, Facebook). Others avoid mentioning it because it reminds them of another year gone and opportunities missed. I’ve always...
The Simplest Way to Build Trust
Few things have a more powerful effect on employee engagement and performance than trust. Hopefully, I don’t have to convince you of the importance trust at work. We have thirty or forty years' worth of research to demonstrate its importance (examples: here, here, and...
FORECAST 2022: What to expect and what to do about it
What’s going to happen this year? That’s the million dollar question. There is no way to know for certain. The future is yet to be written and when we feel too certain that we know what’s going to happen, the universe has a way of reminding us that we aren’t in...
Top Employee Engagement Challenges for 2022 (and what do about them)
A few weeks ago, I fielded a survey to inquire about the biggest employee engagement challenges for 2022. If you were one of those who took the time to respond, thank you. Selfishly, I created this survey because I wanted to check in and get an understanding of what...
Same storm, different boats
In March 2020, just as the pandemic was ramping up to wreak havoc on us, writer and broadcaster Damian Barr shared this short reflection on Twitter. We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm. Some are in superyachts. Some have just the one oar. It...
A Time for Thanks
Why Now is the Perfect Time for an Employee Engagement Survey
Last week, I launched a survey to better understand what challenges leaders are anticipating during the next year related to employee engagement. Some themes are emerging in the data. There’s concern about employee burnout. There’s a focus on how to keep remote and...
What I Learned at My First In-Person Conference in Two Years
Two weeks ago, the time had finally come for me to speak in-person at a large conference for the first time in a long time—nearly two years, in fact. I’d known for months that this was coming, and I was really curious how it would feel to once again be face to face...
There Is No Finish Line
Last week, my daughter ran her first cross country race. For those who aren’t familiar with cross country, at her age, it’s a mile and a half run in the “country” (i.e., on grass, through the trees, up and down hills, etc.). She’s new to running and had never run any...
Is a “Thank You” too much to ask?
I’m a fan of the This American Life podcast. I rarely miss an episode. In a recent episode titled “Essential,” they talk to a series of people whose jobs were deemed essential during the pandemic about how their experience working through COVID changed them. As I...
Are we okay?
At least in some places (like where I live in Nebraska), it can be easy to forget that we are still trying to escape a pandemic. We are all anxious and ready to move on and move forward. I know I am. But in our fervor to get back in action, we need to remember that...
How to Quickly Build Connection
In 2012, I published my first book, Social Gravity, with my coauthor and long-time BFF, Joe Gerstandt. We wrote the book to share what we had learned about the importance of networks and relationships to achieve important things in your life. Joe and I met while...
Campfire Conversations on the Future of Work
Things are changing fast at work. Where, when, and how we work is undergoing a transformation that might be leaving you feeling unsettled and unprepared for what lies ahead. With a recent Monster.com study suggesting as many as 95% of people are looking for new jobs,...
Self-Care is a Management Skill
I didn’t get it. When I heard people talking about self-care, it conjured up images of self-indulgent escapism. Self-care was going for a spa day or taking time for a guilty pleasure to forget about the challenges of life. It didn’t feel like something relevant to me....
[Video] What if your team (and you) don’t want to come back to the office but you have no choice?
What do you do if your organization has decided that everyone is coming back to the office and your people don't want to come? And what if you feel the same way? One of the most challenging times to manage is when you get stuck between a company decision (that you may...
5 Words to Help You Master the Future of Work
Some of the best advice I ever got came almost 30 years ago. I was in high school. Being a bonafide band nerd, I was spending a week of my summer vacation at the Clark Terry Jazz Camp hoping to polish my trumpet skills enough to become king of nerds—First Chair...
The Simple Way to Avoid Being a Bad Boss
While it’s been a long time since it first happened, I still remember the gravity of the responsibility I felt when first asked to supervise people at work. A manager has a profound impact not just on our experience at work but also on our life. When you get it...
[Video] Do You Have This Management Blindspot?
Over the past year, you've probably learned that when a team is "distributed," it becomes more complicated to manage. And we've focused a lot of attention on how being distributed out of a centralized office location has changed how we manage and work. Distributed =...
Managing Through Love
Dr. Vivek Murthy, the United States Surgeon General, recently gave the commencement address to the UC Berkeley School of Public Health graduates. In his comments, he provided some interesting and compelling advice to these graduates, most of whom are entering into a...
![[Video] Should We Still Be Shaking Hands?](https://jasonlauritsen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/jason-lauritsen-blog-shaking-hands-scaled-1-400x250.jpg)
[Video] Should We Still Be Shaking Hands?
I don't know about you, but as more people get vaccinated, the world seems determined to make its way back to normal. In some ways, this is comforting. But I'm feeling a little unsettled. Amidst the terribleness of the pandemic, we were forced to stop and change...
How Much Should a Manager Know About Their Employees’ Personal Lives?
Over the past several months, I’ve been working hard to spread the message that what managers need to successfully navigate this new future of work is compassion. Compassion connects an awareness of the struggles and suffering of employees with caring actions to help...
3 Big Things You’re Getting Wrong about Post-Pandemic Work
We’ve officially entered the part of our pandemic journey where we can start planning for how our teams or organizations will work once this virus is under control. To wrestle through sorting out what changes to keep and which to discard as we try to find a new...
How Has Employee Experience Changed?
I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of things over the last year. So many things changed so quickly. It was disorienting. Very little has felt certain or settled. And maybe the one thing that has felt the most...
Why Employee Well-being is Vital to Work Performance
There’s a lot of talk about employee well-being right now. Apparently, suffering through a global pandemic is enough to finally get us thinking about our well-being more seriously. The consequences of a lack of well-being have been laid bare over the last year. But...