Atlassian recognizes that the ever-increasing complexity of work in our gig economy has thrust teams into a new role: they are the growth engines of business. The company has studied and worked with hundreds of teams over the years—technical and leadership, small and large, diverse and homogeneous. And along the way, Atlassian has learned a few things about what derails team health and performance and what empowers teams to stretch, fly and be the very best they can be.

This opening keynote will explore team dynamics and best practices, and how to overcome issues including trust, clarity, communication, and prioritization. While research proves that the introduction of a diverse team member materially increases the impact of a team, Atlassian recognizes that to truly maximize team impact requires a greater understanding of what is going on at the individual level.

Raj Subramaniam, FedEx executive vice president and chief marketing officer, believes it takes vision and a people-focused workplace to build and sustain a great culture. Every day FedEx team members around the world are motivated by a pledge to customers and to each other to make every experience outstanding – the Purple Promise. Learn more about how this simple yet effective principle drives success at one of the world’s most admired companies.

According to a recent Gallup poll, 43 percent of Americans surveyed spend some time working remotely, and the amount of time employees spend working remotely has also increased. Business benefits aside, a remote culture can set up a unique challenge for HR leaders charged with building and maintaining company culture.

In this session, Julian Lute from Great Place to Work will moderate a panel of three culture leaders whose companies have done a stellar job building culture across remote teams.

Panelists:

Sarah Elizabeth Graham - Employee Communications & Culture Manager at Twitter
Katie Womersley - Director of Engineering at Buffer
Afeef Hussain - Regional Director of Training and Development at LUX Resorts & Hotels

Moderator:

Julian Lute - Organizational Culture Consultant at Great Place to Work

It's been proven that organizations who build and maintain a culture of creativity are more agile, engaged, innovative, and successful. In this session, Joshua Lavra will walk through the six key behaviors that build creative and innovative teams and include data and case studies that help conceptualize each behavior.

Do you plan meetings, offsites, team building, or conferences for your company? Then this session is for you (or anyone else who is interested to learn about successful event design through the eyes of a game design company!) In this talk, we'll present design principles to consider when planning crowd-pleasing events for your company.

We'll also help you on your culture champion journey with the business case and academic research that gets buy-in from leaders to prioritize culture-building events. We'll learn all these principles and then get to see many of them in action with an interactive and playful game immediately following.

Imagine if the Amazing Race, America’s Funniest Home Videos, and Cranium got funky at Culture Summit. That's The Classic Go Game. In this interactivity activity, you'll work with other culture champions to solve creative challenges that include fun trivia, photos and videos, head to head battles, and location riddles. This session provides a community building experience that helps you develop your peer/ally relationships.

Over the past several years, mindfulness has gained so much traction that in a 2014 article, Time magazine called it a revolution. If you’re not familiar with mindfulness, it’s about being focused on the present moment.

That means you’re not worrying about tomorrow’s deadline or dwelling on what happened in yesterday’s meeting. This shift enables you to step back and make better decisions while helping to increase creativity, focus, and productivity.

But with mindfulness gaining a cult-like status in the business world, are we all just blindly following the leader? Are there cautionary tales we should be aware of?

In this presentation, Aaron Kahlow, founder of Conscious Circles, will navigate you through the good, bad, and ugly about mindfulness at work and how to properly use it in the workplace.

This is a new session we're incorporating this year to give attendees the chance to share and present at Culture Summit. This Fishbowl style interactive discussion moderated by Robin Zander, offers attendees the opportunity to speak on the main stage and share insights, strategies, and best practices on how they have turned their company culture around.

Core values matter. They support the company mission, help shape the culture, and reflect what is important to the company. They are the essence of a company’s identity and serve as its cultural cornerstones.

However, defining your company core values is only the first step. They need to be integrated into every aspect of your company. That’s how you ensure your values are more than just words. From the first interview to the last day of work, employees should understand that the company core values form the basis for every decision they make.

In this keynote presentation, Cat Lee, Head of Culture at Pinterest will share how Pinterest weaves its mission and core values into every aspect of their employee experience.

Culture transformation can start from anywhere; even the deepest, tiniest, simplest steps which, when repeated over and over, will ideally become part of a company culture’s muscle memory.

These steps known as rituals can be thought of as small and tangible improvements to one’s workplace. They help redesign how employees interact from an atomic level.

At Warby Parker they have established a bunch of rituals that reflect the values and culture of the company they are trying to build. For example, when a new hire joins Warby Parker, they get a copy of author Jack Kerouac’s book ‘Dharma Bums’ because the name Warby Parker comes from two characters in the book.

Although simple in nature, rituals can be powerful drives of culture. In this session, Susan Lee, VP of Culture at Warby Parker, will show you how creating rituals help strengthen and reinforce your company’s culture and core values.

Calculating the ROI of culture is extremely difficult. Unlike other departments in an organization, the output of your people initiatives has few measurable outputs.

Because of this, it’s difficult to demonstrate the absolute value of making investments in your talent practices. And without being able to articulate the ROI of culture, getting budget and resources for your people initiatives becomes a real challenge.

That’s because you need leadership buy-in, which is critical in making any large organizational change happen.

In this panel moderated by Jack Altman, CEO of Lattice, Jack will discuss with three culture leaders, how they calculate the ROI of culture at their companies and what tools and tactics they use.

Panelist:

Katelin Holloway - VP of People at Reddit
Melanie Moore - Director of Global Operations, Talent Acquisition, and Employment Branding at Monsanto
Justin Kan - CEO of Atrium

Moderator:

Jack Altman - Co-Founder and CEO of Lattice

Improving customer experience is often a top business priority, but what about employee experience? Studies have shown that companies that excel at customer experience have a workforce that is 1.5X more engaged than companies that don't excel at customer experience. In this session, Gaurav Valani will use the principals of customer success to teach you how to design your employee experience to maximize engagement and performance.

In this keynote, Gaurav will cover designing culture and the employee journey as it spans across:

- Hiring
- Onboarding
- Performance
- Growth
- Exit

In this facilitated interactive networking activity, you'll get to discover more about your core values and passions, connect with other culture champions on a deeper level, and share best practices about culture transformation through facilitated full group, small group and dyad challenges. This session helps create unique and memorable interactions that will support you in building your ``culture network.``

In 2013, McKinsey & Company published a report called “Lessons from the leading edge of gender diversity.” In this report, it was noted that CEOs of companies most successful at creating gender diversity have been committed to the cause at a much more personal level, with a passion that “goes well beyond logic and economics.” In this session, LaFawn Davis, Global Head of Culture & Inclusion at Twilio, will discuss the importance of moving beyond numbers to changing leaders' hearts and minds to create a truly inclusive and diverse company culture.

Research shows the rising political and cultural tension in and outside of the office is impacting company cultures. In times of volatility, are your managers equipped to truly lead, to build and retain diverse and inclusive teams? Join this timely conversation with Michelle Kim to learn how to supercharge your managers to be agents of change in creating and sustaining inclusive culture.

The importance of employee engagement can’t be overstated. When employees are engaged, productivity rises, turnover decreases, and daily performance increases across the board.

Many organizations, unfortunately, don't have the resources to give workers more time off or a big budget to spend on retreats and team outings. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t engage your employees.

It’s important is to make sure, employee engagement isn’t an afterthought. Instead, engaging employees should be practiced at all levels of the business and cultivated on a regular basis.

In this closing keynote by Dr. Karlyn Borysenko will walk through several ways to engage your employees without breaking the bank. In fact, you don’t even have to spend a dime.