Key insights at Great Place to Work Conference 2017 themed ‘Culture Drives Performance’

The Great Place to Work Conference 2017 is a unique flagship event aimed at inspiring corporate leaders to create and sustain a high-trust, high-performance culture in their workplace. The conference will be held on 28 June at the Cinnamon Grand Hotel in Colombo.

This corporate forum will highlight the importance of advocating a culture of trust to ensure enhanced employee engagement and thereby encourage optimal performance at workplaces. A stellar line-up of approximately 15 corporate champions and thought leaders will present their experiences relating to the overall theme of ‘Culture Drives Performance’. 

The sessions will also discuss strategies on how to ‘Assess’ the employee perception and the effectiveness of existing people practices, ‘Align’ organisational goals and ‘Advance’ towards better performance.

The keynote address will be delivered on ‘Driving Culture: A Mission with a Passion’ by trailblazer and CEO/Managing Director at MAS Kreeda Sarinda Unamboowe, reflecting on his decades of experience across multiple industries and organisations. 

Drawing from her wisdom of nearly 25 years in a leading corporate, President of HR, Legal, Sustainability and Enterprise Risk Management at John Keells Group, Dilani Alagaratnam, will express her views on’Better Culture Means Better Business: A Blue-Chip Experience’.

Co-Founder and CEO of 99X Technology, Mano Sekaram, will illustrate the key drivers for accelerated organisational performance through his knowledge-sharing session on ‘Culture on steroids – The High Performing Formula’.

“Trust is no longer just nice-to-have, it has become an imperative to gain a comparative advantage,” states culture guru and CEO of the Great Place to Work Institute in India and Director at the Great Place to Work Institute in Sri Lanka, Prasenjit Bhattacharya, who will be presenting his case on ‘It all comes down to Trust’.

Moreover, Great Place to Work in Sri Lanka will present the insights from the five-year national study on workplace culture highlighting key drivers for employee engagement and how the best workplaces are differentiated from the rest.

In addition, there will be two Plenary Sessions which will bring together panels of CXO’s from leading organisations across various industries. They will deliberate on topics that are currently trending.

The plenary session in the morning will address ‘Culture Shift: Aligning and Transforming Organisational Culture’. This cross-industry panel of CXO’s from Brandix Lanka, DFCC Bank, LAUGFS Holdings, Marriott Hotels and Softlogic Holdings will elaborate on the changes taking place in the work environment and the effective people practices being implemented to overcome the challenges and transform the organisational culture.

The afternoon plenary session featuring CXO’s from AOD, Auxenta, HNB Bank, Huawei and Kapruka.com will present the concept of ‘Creating an innovative culture in the age of digital differentiation’. They will discuss the importance of innovation and illustrate the tools, techniques and best practices being adopted to ensure the competitiveness of a business in this digital era.

The Great Place to Work Institute will be launching its Certification Program in Sri Lanka at this year’s conference. Great Place to Work-Certified will be recognised and endorsed by the Employee Federation of Ceylon (EFC) in their Compliance Plus program. These workplaces will also have the option of forwarding their results to be recognised in the Best Workplaces Lists. Additionally, a multitude of new industry-specific lists as well as a Best Start-ups List will be unveiled at the conference.

The Great Place to Work Institute will also be conducting its annual ‘We Love Our Workplace’ Video Contest parallel to the conference. This competition provides employees of workplaces across the country with the opportunity to show why they love their workplace through a two-minute video.

The contest is being facilitated through the Great Place to Work Facebook page. Videos of the three finalists will be played at the event and a panel of judges will collectively select the winner of the contest. Any workplace with 20 or more employees and which has been in operation in Sri Lanka for more than one year will be eligible. The deadline for submission is 10 June 2017.

The Great Place to Work Institute is a global research and consultancy firm that helps workplaces become extraordinary by creating a high-trust, high-performance culture. Over 30 years of global research and data analysis of the best workplaces has contributed to the model, methodology, benchmarks, global database of people practices used to support organisations of all sizes and how industries define, measure, improve and leverage their company culture as a strategic priority.