Erica Keswin

Managers are really having a moment. Between the Great Resignation, a lingering pandemic, employees demanding flexibility, skyrocketing mental health challenges, a looming recession, and general uncertainty, more and more employees are turning to their direct supervisors for direction and support. Unfortunately, managers aren’t always prepared to meet their moment because they’re woefully under-trained and overworked while tasked with leading their teams during heightened turbulence. To retain your managers — and the employees who report to them — you need to invest in their development. The author presents three ways to do it.

Rituals can make your workplace more human, further employee engagement, foster a sense of belonging, and help workers connect with one another and their work. Erica Keswin, a workplace strategist and author of Rituals Roadmap: The Human Way to Transform Everyday Routines into Workplace Magic, has spent years researching rituals and helping companies connect their teams and create a more human-centered workplace…

Employees rightly expect to be able to bring their feelings — big and small — to work. One important way to provide that support is through rituals. The author defines rituals using two important benchmarks. First, rituals go beyond their practical purpose, moving participants beyond transaction and into meaning. For instance, lighting a candle when the lights go out isn’t a ritual, but turning off the lights and lighting a candle at sundown is. Second, rituals are sorely missed when they’re taken away. The author presents a case study from a company that took a risk in real time and created a successful response to a tragedy, and over time, that response became a ritual. Here’s how they did it, and how leaders can better understand their own rituals — both current ones and those that have yet to be discovered.

People’s lives and priorities are changing in dramatic ways before our very eyes. While increasing compensation, promoting from within, offering flexible schedules, and making remote work easier are always good talent strategies, there’s one lever leaders can pull that’s highly accessible, doesn’t have to be expensive, and gives employees something they really want: on-the-job professional development. The author offers three ways for leaders to prioritize learning and development in their organizations. First, incorporate learning into onboarding and give employees time for it regularly. Second, make learning a ritual. Finally, offer coaching to all your employees — not just executives.

In light of the Great Resignation—or as some call it, the Great Reshuffle—the stakes have never been higher for talent development, because companies likely will be conducting a lot more onboarding in the future. Thus, it is the right time for TD functions to improve the effectiveness of their onboarding process, which comes down to fostering a greater feeling of connection to the organization from day one….

If your goal is to bring people together in real life at work — sometimes, all the time, or anytime — you need to design a day employees won’t want to miss. At the very least, it’s critical to be intentional about how you plan your company’s days in the office, not only to add incentive, but also to make it worth your employees’ and your company’s time. The author recounts her experience working with a company to design in-person, monthly “Superdays” and presents three elements of a successful on-site.

What a difference a week makes. A month ago we could never have predicted the state of the world today — a global pandemic, sports games with no spectators, schools (including those of all three of my kids) having moved to remote learning…

Rituals can transform everyday routines into magic. If you don’t believe me, look at what’s happening every night at 7 p.m. in New York City and a number of cities across the globe, including Vancouver, Portland, Los Angeles and Atlanta…

Welcome to Keswin Family Quarantine. Like many people, my husband and I are both working from home. Our girls, Julia and Caroline, are 17-year-old juniors in high school, navigating both online school and the college process. Daniel is a freshman in high school. And who could forget the family favorite, Cruiser, our labradoodle…

My brother-in-law is a Rabbi. Two weeks ago, he held a zoom meeting with his team to update everyone on policies, protocols and how they were going to proceed in light of the coronavirus. They all did the work they needed to do, but also connected on a human level, sharing…

Lady Gaga eats breakfast and has “mindful thoughts.” Jane Austen woke up and played the piano. Beyonce prays. Me? I walk to Starbucks for my grande, extra-hot soy latte. I travel so much these days giving talks and doing research for my next book on rituals at work that I don’t always…

Ok, so the jury’s still out on the open office. And our tech definitely makes it hard to have time off, but the 2010s have utterly shifted the look, feel and mission of corporate life—for the better! I’d go so far as to call 2010s the #humandecade!…

I know Thanksgiving is a couple days away, so you’re probably already obsessing about your menu, your travel plans, your hostess gifts or your nap. Or maybe you’re worrying about everyone getting along. As if political divisions aren’t enough, there’s this old-as-the-hills generational divide that’s taking on new life lately….

On a Sunday afternoon in September, 18 women and one man—mostly strangers—gathered in California to do something pretty crazy. We were technically on a “retreat,” but not the R & R/mani-pedi/soft-music-and-thick-towels type of retreat you might imagine. In fact, quite the opposite….

Monday, August 26th.  Thursday, September 5th. Maybe these dates don’t mean much to you. But to our family they signal some of our favorite things—this year the US Open started on August 26th, and September 5th was the kickoff of football season. We’re big fans of rituals of every stripe, but sports rituals have a special place in our hearts….

I remember getting ready for the first day of school like it was yesterday: Going shopping for my first pair of Jordache jeans. I thought long and hard about what I was going to wear on that first day, then I laid it out on my bed the night before while I packed my pencil case and lunch box….

How can your workplace be more human? Author Erica Keswin dropped by LIFT Labs PHL to offer some answers. She’s the author of Wall Street Journal best-seller Bring Your Human to Work, and frequently consults with organizations and individuals to help them improve performance through relationship building.

Erica Keswin’s “Aha!” moment happened a decade ago on a Bermuda beach. She signed into work with her Blackberry, in a lounge chair and said out loud “This is the life!”. The ability to leverage technology – and in some cases leave it behind- in order to bring more personal meaning and human purpose to work is essential.

Do you ever wonder how to create a human workplace in an increasingly freelance, remote, contingent, and gigged-out world? You’re not the only one. And no, “human workplace” isn’t an oxymoron.

When most managers think of professional learning and development, they think of opportunities for their direct reports to improve skills that will help them in their current jobs. After all, the company’s paying the bills, so it makes sense that managers will want to see results when the class is over or the conference attendee returns to his or her desk.

During a keynote at a recent conference, I asked the audience to raise their hands if they worked for a company that has a mission and set of values. All of the hands went up. Then I asked them to keep their hands raised if those values actually meant something. Only about a third of the hands stayed up.

Ever gotten a Slack message from someone sitting 10 feet away and wondered why he couldn’t have just walked over? Or been in a meeting and caught colleagues surreptitiously tapping away at their phones under the table? Or, worse, found yourself getting distracted when your phone buzzes during a meeting, then being completely unprepared when your boss asks you a question?

Let’s face it. Left to our own devices (excuse the pun) we’re not connecting — especially at work. The key to finding happiness at work is to honor relationships — with our colleagues, our customers, ourselves and the world.

Big business drives so much more than our economy: it shapes our culture and society. And more and more CEOs are acting like the important thought leaders they should be, taking responsibility above and beyond pleasing their investors and boards.

A millennial, a GenXer, and a baby boomer all walked into a bar. The millennial was talking about how he wanted to find a job where he could have “real impact.” The Boomer rolled his eyes, and actually said, “I hate managing millennials.”