Embracing Empathy: How to Incorporate Empathy in the Workplace and Create Actionable Steps

Thursday, February 22nd

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM

Dutch's Daughter (IN PERSON ONLY)

Program Description

The workforce is more diverse than ever, yet the way we interact with each other doesn’t always reflect these ethnic and cultural differences. Navigating a world where we must constantly engage emotions, opinions and ideas that we don’t always understand or agree with doesn’t have to be impossible. In fact it can be greatly beneficial to team productivity, innovation, creativity and overall company success.

This talk shows HR professionals how to create, build and maintain organizational inclusion by engaging in everyday empathy behaviors. Keynote speaker Sharon Steed offers a fresh take on how to make empathy actionable as a person who stutters; she uses her speech impediment – and the funny, difficult and life-long lessons it taught her – to teach HR professionals how to define empathy as individuals and as organizations and the key empathy behaviors required to build inclusive cultures.

Speaker Bio

Sharon Steed is an international keynote speaker, author and founder of Communilogue, a corporate empathy and communications consultancy. She is a subject matter expert on empathy at work, and she teaches teams and organizations the key empathy behaviors necessary to retain top talent and improve individual and team performance. Sharon has spoken at companies and conferences in 17 countries spanning five continents, with a focus on improving team communication and collaboration through engaging empathy and vulnerability as a professional asset. She has given a TEDx talk on empowering insecurities.

 A lifelong stutterer, Sharon uses her speech impediment to both teach what empathy is and to inspire audiences to engage in empathy actions daily. An author and course instructor for O'Reilly Media, Inc., her eBook Empathy at Work is available in the O’Reilly library. Sharon’s LinkedIn Learning course "Communicating With Empathy" has been translated to over a dozen languages; it over 500,000 views. A Midwest, USA native, she currently lives in Pennsylvania, USA.

Thank you to our meeting sponsor!