JOYOUS - Key Persons


Donna Jones

Job Titles:
  • Group Manager, Talent, Diversity and Inclusion at Transdev Australasia
As Group Manager, Talent, Diversity and Inclusion at Transdev Australasia, Donna is responsible for designing and implementing the Diversity & Inclusion strategic framework as well as the overall talent blueprint. Donna has developed and implemented numerous strategies to diversify conventionally male dominated industries including supply chain & logistics, oil & gas, and information technology. She is currently Transdev's Implementation Lead for Male Champions of Change. Connect with Donna:

Jamie Finnegan

Jamie has extensive experience working with top Australian startups to help hire talent, consult on growth strategy, and advise on company values and culture. He is passionate about creating a work environment in which everyone feels comfortable, valued and empowered. In his new role, Jamie is responsible for the growth of finder's team whilst also designing and driving business initiatives to further enhance Finder's unique culture. Connect with Jamie:

Jason Lauritsen July

Job Titles:
  • Employee Experience, Engagement, Leadership 1 Comment
As a keynote speaker, Jason helps employees and leaders more clearly see the path towards a more engaging work (and life) experience. Beyond speaking, he also advises leaders and organizations who are working to solve the challenge of employee engagement and workplace culture. He frequently writes and blogs about topics related to employee engagement, workplace culture, and leadership, and co-authored the book Social Gravity: Harnessing the Natural Laws of Relationships. Connect with Jason: There was a point in my career, probably 18 or 20 years or so ago, that I would have argued vehemently that creating a workplace culture that engages employees was vital to sustaining a profitable business. I believed in my heart that it was an imperative. At the time, I was an HR leader working at an organization where my CEO really believed (and invested) in the value of people not only as employees but as human beings with lives beyond work. For me, it was the perfect place to practice HR. While my CEO was pragmatic in how he …

Kai Crow December

Job Titles:
  • Employee Experience, Engagement, Feedback, Leadership Leave a Comment
  • Head of Marketing at AskNicely
Kai is Head of Marketing at AskNicely, one of the world's leading specialist Net Promoter Score software providers. Having worked in a range of high-growth businesses, he understands how important it is to maintain a high level of both customer and employee experience and believes nothing is more important than collecting and listening to feedback from your staff and customers. Connect with Kai: Employee NPS (eNPS) is based on Net Promoter Score® (NPS™) by Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. It's commonly used as a quick indicator of employee engagement because engaged (and loyal) employees are more likely to recommend their workplace. NPS recap NPS measures customer loyalty by asking: ‘How likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or relative?' The idea is that loyal customers believe so strongly in the company they're recommending that they're willing to put their reputation on the line for it. Friends and relatives are typically the people we feel most strongly …

Karen Rayner

Karen is a digital marketing and content generalist who unironically specializes in B2B and SaaS communications. She's spent most of the last 10 years writing about how people can use technology for good, not Skynet, and previously won a Writemark Plain English award for making performance reviews sound interesting. Connect with Karen:

Laura-Jane Booker

Having completed a Masters in Organisational Psychology, Laura-Jane is interested in understanding what drives employee behaviour and what HR experts can do to enable all of their employees to perform and thrive. Laura-Jane hopes to bridge the gap that exists between academics and practitioners by using her ability to interpret and translate academic research so that it can be used to inform business practice. Connect with Laura-Jane:

Laura-Jane Booker November

Job Titles:
  • Employee Experience, Engagement, Leadership, Motivation Leave a Comment
Leadership style can make or break the success of an organisation, team, or project. While different leadership styles suit different situations, effective styles share one common trait - emotional intelligence (EQ). Daniel Goleman (an EQ expert) proposed that there are 6 effective leadership styles, each stemming from 4 key EQ competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social skills. Coercive/Commanding Lead by force Climate influence: This style has a negative impact on the climate and demotivates employees as it eliminates the opportunity for new ideas, reduces accountability for performance, and destroys the rewards system. Of the 6 styles, coercive is the …

Laura-Jane Booker October

Job Titles:
  • Employee Experience, Engagement, Leadership Leave a Comment
Leaders need to get results: whether revenue growth, return on sales, efficiency, profitability, employee satisfaction, or employee engagement. Quite the task! So how on earth do leaders do it? One way is by influencing the organisation's climate, which can account for a third of an organisation's financial performance. How? Glad you asked! Six ways leaders can influence organisational climate Permit Flexibility - give employees the freedom to experiment and take calculated risks to achieve goals without unnecessary restrictions and micromanaging. Flexibility promotes creativity, innovation, and accountability over one's work. Create Responsibility - give employees control over their own work to …

Leah Chaney

Leah co-founded BetterGrowth to help businesses scale and grow more effectively by delivering great customer and employee experiences. With over 16 years experience in Client Success over her career, Leah has enhanced her leadership and communication skills with some of the nation's most successful technology companies. As one of the first 38 employees hired by Bazaarvoice in 2006, a company that went IPO in 2011 with more than 800 employees, she learned early in her career how to successfully grow and scale fast growing startups while putting customers at the heart of the business. Connect with Leah:

Matt Johns

Matt is passionate about deliberately designed experiences - for both customers and employees, and places significant value in understanding how people are feeling and thinking before designing targeted solutions. To achieve this, Matt has developed a unique methodology incorporating ethnography as a way to understand people and their unique behaviours. This approach draws on his wider experience, including as an intelligence operative in the UK police to understand how emotions and motivations impact individual behaviour. Connect with Matt:

Michael Carden - Founder

Job Titles:
  • Founder
Founder Sonar6. Founder Joyous. Published author in marketing, employee experience and software industry. Mike is a past Winner of the Writemark Plain English Award and the Bayer Innovators Award. He is regarded as an expert in Software as a Service business models, and technology marketing. Mike also holds board and advisory board roles in various technology companies ranging from investor led early stage through to established public companies. Connect with Michael:

Net Promoter Score

Job Titles:
  • Specialist

Philip Carden

Co-founded Joyous. Ran a global division at Alcatel-Lucent/Bell-Labs. Passionate about the role of fairness in building great employee experiences. Philip chaired Australasia's first Employee Experience (EX) Summit, and two major CX conferences. He is extensively published on EX/CX as well as automation, analytics, security and telecoms. Connect with Philip:

Robin Schooling

An advocate for the workplace revolution, Robin regularly speaks to global HR and business audiences, and has written for Fast Company, Recruiting Daily, HRExaminer, Certified Magazine and SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management). The Huffington Post named her one of The Top 100 Most Social Human Resource Experts on Twitter and Glassdoor called her one of the 2015 HR and Recruiting Thought Leaders to Follow. Connect with Robin:

Ruby Kolesky

Job Titles:
  • Head of Product
Ruby is Head of Product at Joyous. She has over 10 years experience in software organisations of all sizes, and has survived various stages of organisational growth She understands what it's like to be in a large organisation - both as a leader and team member. Her mission is to support all working people, and especially leaders live their best life at work. Connect with Ruby:

Ruby Kolesky February

Job Titles:
  • Employee Experience, Feedback, Leadership Leave a Comment
About two years into my career as an engineering team leader I had to have a difficult conversation. The conversation was with Connor (not his real name), a junior engineer, who had recently joined our team. Connor was consistently arriving to work late, taking long lunches, and leaving early. As his team lead I knew that I needed to talk to him, so I arranged a meeting: difficult conversations should always take place in person. Not long before this, I had attended a leadership training course lead by Nick Reid, from Training for Change. So, I used the SCORE approach …

Ruby Kolesky June

Job Titles:
  • Employee Experience, Feedback, Leadership Leave a Comment
I think of myself as a leader being placed somewhere on a value based spectrum, with efficiency on one end and empathy on the other. As an individual contributor, I started my career all the way on the efficiency end of the spectrum. I believed that talking to people about their feelings was a waste of time. Turns out, that's not true at all. Leaders who value efficiency over empathy tend to sacrifice investing time in relationships with their team members. The result? Ironically, team efficiency is negatively impacted. Why? Because team members who don't have close relationships with their …

Samantha Gadd March

Job Titles:
  • Employee Experience, Leadership, Wellness Leave a Comment
Along with founding Humankind and Kin, Samantha has proven experience and success across the broad range of HR functions including strategy, recruitment, employment relations, restructuring, performance management, learning and development and coaching across small/medium business, hospitality, government and professional services including one of New Zealand's top tier law firms. Samantha is excited about the future of work and passionate about how focusing on employee experience is great for business. Connect with Samantha: "The benefit of entering the awards is that it's like a disciplined review - it enables you to pause and reflect on the programme with your team on how it's all working." Steve Martin, Lightspeed Graphics Lightspeed Graphics' Operations Director, Steve Martin, said they were ‘over the moon' when they first heard their name announced as winners of the EX Initiative of the Year at the Humankind Employee Experience Awards, EX18, in November. Because they are a relatively young company (they're just about to celebrate their 2nd birthday), and they are in a highly competitive industry, winning an award like …

Sandy Burgham

Sandy is the founder of Play Contemporary Leadership Colab, an organization committed to raising the consciousness of leaders. Residing in New Zealand, she has held a number of commercial leadership roles in three sectors - communications, research and fashion retail as well as working in consultancy and communications in London. With 30+ years of diverse work and leadership experience coupled with academic study of history and gender, she has developed a key interest in how gender pertains to leadership, culture and systems change. Connect with Sandy:

Serge van Dam

Serge is a Serge van Dam is ‘hands on' investor in software companies that automate dull white-collar work, focusing on leadership development and building great teams. He studied Organizational Psychology at Victoria University and started out his career as an HR consultant. Connect with Serge:

Tim Sackett

Tim has 20 years of combined Executive HR and Talent Acquisition experience, working for Fortune 500 companies. Tim is a highly sought after international speaker on leadership, HR Tech, talent acquisition and HR execution. Tim is currently the President-elect for the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP). He is a lifelong workplace advocate for Diet Mt. Dew fountain machines and he considered the world's foremost expert on workplace hugs. Connect with Tim: