Creating a workplace where all employees can bring their unique talents, skills and passions to the table is an imperative. Yet with the diverse and dispersed teams that organizations have today, leaders are challenged to find ways to keep their employees fully engaged and connected.

In this highly interactive and 100% hands-on session, participants will experience out-of-the-box, easy to use team engagement tools that they can put to use immediately to connect employees across different backgrounds, skill sets, generations, and genders.

In this session, participants will:

• Learn simple strategies for engaging managers and employees both virtually and face-to-face
• Experience creative team collaboration tools and practices
• Identify how these can support existing engagement strategies and quickly put these to work

Some of the experiences that attendees will participate in include:

• Speed strategic planning sessions
• Collaboration tools
• Discovery icebreakers
• Virtual graphic facilitation
• Blue sky experiences

Sheryl Lewis Managing Director, ROI Communication

It's often been said that leaders "make the weather" in an organization. More and more as business communicators, we're recognizing the role that effective leadership communication plays in employee engagement and business results. So how can we avoid being "weather-beaten" and harness the power of leadership communication to further business objectives?

In this workshop, David Grossman, APR, ABC, PRSA Fellow, will focus on the key principles, skills and competencies we need as business communicators to help our leaders ensure "good weather." Attendees will learn how to teach leaders the theory behind effective leadership communication, and how to be counselors and coaches for leaders.

Grounded in an immensely successful proven leadercommunicator™ model, the interactive session will give attendees:

• A concrete, quantifiable business case for leadership communication as a discipline
• Innovative techniques and tactics for coaching leaders
• A model-based approach to leadership communication that can apply in any organization
• Best practices, practical tools and hands-on experiences they can put to work right away

Through this workshop, you'll be ready to start influencing - not just predicting - the weather in your organization, and turning your leaders to leadercommunicators for better business results.

David Grossman President and Principal thoughtpartner, dg&a

Every engagement program should be much more than a one-hit wonder. Instead, think of each effort as part of an overall, ongoing process that must be laced with continuous improvement efforts. But it's not just the role of the communications department to drive engagement. True engagement both informs and involves your entire workforce - at every level and across all functions.

One way to think about engagement is to consider employees as business partners. Employee action teams are an incredibly powerful tool. When deployed and managed correctly, these front-line team members partner with management to drive ultimate engagement and deliver ongoing results that consistently exceed the expectations of the management team.

At L.M. Dulye & Co., we call this a "Spectator-Free Workforce."

In this highly interactive workshop, you'll learn the steps necessary to create the team and the process correctly. And you'll learn how to keep the team empowered and engaged, which will ultimately keep the momentum going and drive positive change across the organization. This workshop will include how to:

• Get top leaders interested and involved
• Select and launch employee teams, including selection of the right people
• Give teams clear direction and expectations
• Create improvement plans that are actionable and measurable
• Use a 9-step method for guiding teams through real problem solving
• Create accountability
• Report results using scorecards

Measurement is a key component of what keeps teams accountable and sustains momentum and buy-in for engagement programs. So, you'll also learn how to:

• Leverage team members to conduct measurement
• Use simple tools to regularly assess progress
• Re-think the initial strategy and any failing efforts
• Revise action plans based on improvements needed

Linda Dulye President and Founder, L.M. Dulye & Co.