Here at Workplace Therapy, we talk a lot about toxic workplace experiences and how organizations, leaders and individuals can invest in the work of charting a different path.

In today’s session, we’re fortunate to have an expert who has devoted her life to this work, and brings a unique set of skills, techniques and perspectives to bear in her mission to help organizations develop a talent strategy that enables their business strategy.

Michelle Alexandrowicz is CEO of Engage, a consulting firm that helps organizations make data-driven decisions about how talent impacts business strategy. Michelle is an organizational psychologist by training and uses her deep knowledge of what makes people tick coupled with quantitative rigor and business acumen to help her clients fully utilize their most powerful asset: their people.

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On this week's episode, we have a couple of experts on the show who will help us understand why the traditional approach to performance reviews is so ineffective and most importantly - how we can change our approach to performance reviews to enhance performance and engagement in our organizations. Lauren Koester is a seasoned HR and operations professional. She’s currently the Head of People at Occupier, a SaaS platform that serves clients in the commercial real estate sector. Also joining us is Josh Merrill, CEO of Confirm - an innovative platform that is changing the way organizations think about and administer their performance review processes.

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This episode concludes a two part series. In this series, Scott is joined by his wife Monica Arrieta to discuss how the lessons they've learned in the workplace have impacted how they show up as parents and partners to each other. Monica is a strategic advisor to Unity and Company, where she brings invaluable experience as a global program manager for some of the world’s leading technology companies to help us provide leading edge perspectives and strategies to our clients. She’s an experienced performance coach and plays a vital role in facilitating Unity’s signature training and executive coaching engagements. Join us as Monica and Scott reflect on their own upbrignings and how the lessons they've learned in the workplace have helped them to challenge their own assumptions on what is best for their kids. If you're a working parent - you definitely won't want to miss this discussion!

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In this week's episode, Scott is joined by his wife Monica Arrieta to discuss how the lessons they've learned in the workplace have impacted how they show up as parents and partners to each other. Monica is a strategic advisor to Unity and Company, where she brings invaluable experience as a global program manager for some of the world’s leading technology companies to help us provide leading edge perspectives and strategies to our clients. She’s an experienced performance coach and plays a vital role in facilitating Unity’s signature training and executive coaching engagements. Join us this week as Monica and Scott reflect on their own upbrignings and how the lessons they've learned in the workplace have helped them to challenge their own assumptions on what is best for their kids. If you're a working parent - you definitely won't want to miss this discussion!

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We've talked a lot about the benefits of working in a culture that values psychological safety. On today's episode, we're joined by Jake Herway, a Partner at Gallup and a seasoned expert at driving cultural transofrmation. In today's episode, Jake shares his experience working with executive teams to drive cultural transformation. We discuss how he's successfully used a strengths-based approach to foster trust and psychological safety within teams. We also discuss an article he published for Gallup entitled How to Create a Culture of Psychological safety where he explores some of the research behind psychological safety, delves into what it is and how organizations can begin to cultivate it.

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Many of us have had experiences working in toxic work environments. Working in toxic cultures can have a significant negative impact on your level of engagement at work, your mental health and the quality of your extended relationships. Once we find ourselves in a toxic work environment, it's hard to make a change. Even worse, we may find ourselves escaping one toxic environment only to immerse ourselves in another. In this episode, Scott and Skylar share their experiences as both candidates and interviewers and share some tips on how you can identify red flags early and reduce the risk of committing to yet another dysfunctional environment.

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One of the reasons people go to therapy is to discuss and process a traumatic experience. In this episode, we introduce the concept of "big T" and "little t" traumas. "Big T" traumas describe experiences that threaten your physical safety like physical injury or sexual violence, while little T traumas on the other hand describe experiences that are still distressing but don’t immediately threaten your physical safety like loss of certain relationships or verbal bullying. In the workplace I think very few of our experiences fall into the clinical definition of "Big T" trauma but there are a ton that fall into the little T and maybe even a “micro” T trauma category. For this session we’ll open up these definitions a bit to adapt to the context. We’ll say that trauma is a negative experience that was life-altering for you in some way. In this week's episode, Scott and Skylar share some of their "little t" and "micro t" workplace traumas and discuss how those experiences changed them and what they learned as a result.

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This week at Workplace Therapy, we're discussing a situation that happened recently at Twitter whereby an employee (Hallie Thorleifsson) was laid off without notification and had to resort to tweeting Elon Musk to confirm his employment status. After an initial volley of defensive and accusatory remarks, Elon eventually reached to Hallie and apologized, but not before leaving a trail of trauma and cautionary leadership lessons in his wake.  This week, the workplace therapy team will be taking a look at this case study and discussing what we can learn from the exchange between Musk and Thorleifsson.

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This week, we continue our discussion of an article written by Amy Gallo published by the Harvard Business Review entitled "What is Psychological Safety?" Last week we discussed what trust and psychological safety looks like in the workplace and the benefits of prioritizing trust and psychological safety as a cultural value. This week, we discuss how to determine if your organization has a culture trust and psychological safety and how to cultivate it.

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