Eric Termuende
Engagement scores fall, attrition rises, and the workforce no longer responds to the levers that used to work. Leaders are told to rebuild culture without slowing the business, and most large-scale culture programmes stall before they touch the way teams actually work day to day. The unanswered question is how to change team behaviour fast enough to matter, without launching another transformation no one believes in.
Eric Termuende helps organisations build resilient, high-performing teams by isolating the small operational shifts that drive trust, retention, and performance, drawing on survey research with tens of thousands of employees and leaders.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Eric Termuende
- He gives leadership teams a working language for incremental change. The “one-degree shift” framework reframes culture work as a sequence of small, low-resistance moves teams can actually make, instead of a programme to be launched.
- His research base is original. Rethink Work and the surveys behind it focus on what attracts and retains the right people for a specific workplace, not the best people in the abstract, which is a more useful question for most CHROs.
- He pitches at team level, not enterprise level. Most future-of-work speakers operate at workforce-strategy altitude. Termuende speaks to the manager and the leader of leaders, which is where engagement and retention are actually won or lost.
- He has tested the material against operating environments at Amazon, IBM, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and Nokia. The keynotes have been refined through repeated commercial use, not built for the stage.
Biography highlights
- Co-Founder of NoW of Work, a workplace innovation and leadership consultancy.
- Author of Rethink Work (Barlow Books), an Amazon best-seller on engagement and retention.
- Named to American Express’s Top 100 Emerging Innovators under 35.
- 2022 Arch Award for Early Career Achievement, Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary.
- TEDx speaker (TEDxBCIT, “Bigger than Work”) and Walrus Talks contributor.
- Host of the One Degree Shift podcast, interviewing operators and executives on incremental team change.
Biography
Most culture programmes fail not because the diagnosis is wrong, but because the prescribed change is too big to land. Teams are asked to adopt new behaviours on top of existing workload, and the new behaviours do not survive the first quarter. Eric Termuende’s work begins from this observation.
The argument running through Rethink Work and the surveys behind it is that engagement and retention are decided at the team level, by a small number of recurring behaviours, and that the right intervention is operational rather than aspirational. NoW of Work, the consultancy Termuende co-founded, is built around that premise. The “one-degree shift” framework is its working vocabulary: small, specific behaviour changes designed to reduce friction and build trust without triggering another transformation initiative.
The credentials sit underneath the argument. American Express named him to its Top 100 Emerging Innovators. The University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business gave him its Arch Award for Early Career Achievement in 2022. The material has been refined in front of audiences at Amazon, IBM, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Nokia, and Zoom, and on TEDx and Walrus stages.
For senior people leaders, the proposition is unusually concrete. Termuende leaves an audience with a way to act on Monday morning, not a thesis to debate. That is rare in the future-of-work category, where most speakers operate one level too high to be useful to the line managers who actually run the teams.
Key speaking topics
- Future of work and workforce design
- Team performance and trust
- Talent attraction and retention
- Workplace culture and engagement
- Multigenerational teams
- Leadership in uncertainty
- AI and the manager’s role
Ideal for
- CHROs and people leaders responsible for engagement and retention strategy
- Leadership development and learning teams designing manager curricula
- Operations and divisional leaders running multigenerational teams under change
- Executive offsites focused on culture and talent in growth or post-merger contexts
Audience outcomes
- A working framework for designing small behavioural shifts that hold at team level
- A clearer answer to which people the organisation should be attracting, not just how to attract more
- Practical positions on the multigenerational workforce that line managers can apply
- A reframing of culture work as operational practice, not communications activity
Talks
A keynote on how leaders rebuild team performance and resilience as the employment contract shifts.
Key takeaways:
- The behaviours that distinguish top-performing teams from average ones
- How to design culture work as a sequence of small operational moves
- A practical model for trust, friction, and team-level decision making
A keynote on what AI changes, and does not change, about the manager’s job.
Key takeaways:
- Where AI compresses the manager’s workload and where it amplifies it
- How to redesign team rituals around AI-augmented work
- The skills that hold value as the role of the manager shifts
A keynote on the difference between attracting the best people and attracting the right people.
Key takeaways:
- Why a strong employer brand often attracts the wrong applicants
- How to represent workplace experience honestly without losing competitiveness
- The retention implications of attraction decisions made at the top of the funnel
A keynote on managing across five generations without flattening the differences that matter.
Key takeaways:
- Where generational friction is real and where it is a proxy for other tensions
- How managers adapt feedback, recognition, and ritual across age cohorts
- A practical position on the multigenerational workplace beyond the cliches
A keynote on operating discipline for leaders whose environment refuses to stabilise.
Key takeaways:
- The behavioural habits that hold up under sustained uncertainty
- How leaders maintain team trust when the plan keeps changing
- A working model for adaptive decision making at team level