Building Healthier Teams

Mental health and workplace performance are interconnected. In this keynote I explore behavioural wellness, the intentional actions that foster connection, kindness, and belonging within teams. By prioritising these behaviours, teams can boost effectiveness, strengthen engagement, and enhance overall well-being.

During the expert session, Roy Glukckman engages the audience through interactive exercises, Q&A sessions, and live demonstrations. 

• Understand behavioural wellness and its impact on mental health and team performance.

• Foster connection and kindness to create a culture of trust and belonging. 

• How to enhance engagement and retention through wellness-driven practices.

In this expert session, Roy explores the impact of uncertainty on both individuals and organizations from a psychological perspective. He discusses how uncertain situations trigger a hypervigilant response from our nervous system due to feelings of unsafe, which in turn affects our mental and physical health. Utilizing the concept of a "performance pyramid," Roy illustrates that feeling safe physically and psychologically is vital for optimal performance.

Furthermore, Roy explains how our brains try to create binaries when faced with uncertainty, potentially leading to simplistic or extreme views. He underscores the importance of understanding these dynamics in order to work effectively and maintain good mental and physical health within a team or organization.

Roy provides several suggestions for fostering a sense of belonging and psychological safety in the workplace: co-designing shared feelings, creating rituals of connection, using regulated language, addressing ruptures quickly, and practicing embodied leadership.

Roy continues to explain that in a distributed team setting, building trust and psychological safety becomes more challenging due to physical distance. However, it is still achievable through deliberate efforts in communication, addressing power imbalances, and fostering open dialogue around accountability, safety, vulnerability, and psychological safety. By creating spaces for these discussions, organizations can enable team members to feel safe enough to express their concerns and vulnerabilities, ultimately leading to a more engaged and productive work environment.

Overall, the expert session provides valuable insights into dealing with stress, addressing mistakes, responding to emotions, and fostering a sense of belonging in uncertain times. The importance of communication, understanding power dynamics, and creating a deliberate space for addressing these issues emerged as key takeaways for building a more inclusive and effective work environment.

Unpacking Psychological Safety: To Feel Safe is to Thrive

Psychological safety exists within authentic relationships. Creating authentic relationships takes time, effort and emotional vulnerability - three things that are missing from our organisational spaces today. This keynote unpacks the characteristics and benefits of psychologically safe relationships and spaces and how these help people thrive within organisations. This keynote discusses various models of trust within relationships; looks at privilege and the trust deficit that exists within relationships, and provides solutions on how we can build safer relationships within organisations.

What is ‘Belonging’ really?

The need to belong is a powerful driver of behaviour. We all want to belong. We crave it. We pray for it. We even change for it. The conversation around Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DEI) has evolved to include the idea of ‘belonging’ but have we taken the time to understand what it means to belong? This session addresses what belonging is and how it drives behaviour within our organisations. Organisations can use this to understand how our organisational spaces can assist or frustrate the process of achieving more belonging for more people and offer practical tips on how to create a deeper sense of belonging for more people.

Managing Gen-Z with Confidence

Many managers feel they’re "managing on eggshells" around Gen Z, wary of their directness and social awareness. But what if, instead of fearing this generation, we saw them as a catalyst for growth? In this keynote, we shift from fear to understanding, exploring how Gen Z’s strengths—transparency, accountability, and inclusivity—can transform workplaces.