Shane Feldman
Attrition has stopped being an HR problem and become a strategic one. Engagement scores fall, top performers leave, customer loyalty thins, and the usual response, more perks, more comms, more pulse surveys, fails to touch the underlying issue. The work is rebuilding the reason people commit to an organisation in the first place.
Shane Feldman is a community-building expert and founder of Count Me In who helps organisations rebuild employee and customer loyalty in workplaces where engagement and retention have become strategic risks.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Shane Feldman
- He built Count Me In from a high-school project into a global incubator that has initiated more than 30,000 community ventures across 104 countries. The operator credentials are unusual in the engagement space.
- His research is field-built, not desk-built. Feldman has embedded himself in more than 100 cities across six continents to study how communities form, hold, and break, and translates that fieldwork into corporate retention frameworks.
- His client list (Google, Disney, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, PwC, TD Bank, Kaiser Permanente, Netflix, Coca-Cola, YPO) signals a buyer base of large, complex employers who use him for substantive HR and culture interventions, not motivational filler.
- He carries genuine media credibility (A&E “Undercover High”, coverage by Forbes, People, Larry King, Oprah) that lifts the marketing weight of the engagement around a keynote.
- Recognised by the White House, the United Nations, and the Prime Minister of Canada for community leadership work, which makes the substantive claim on community expertise defensible rather than rhetorical.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of Count Me In, a social entrepreneurship incubator with more than 30,000 ventures launched across 104 countries.
- Author of “A Kids Book About Community” (A Kids Co., 2020).
- Cast member of A&E docuseries “Undercover High” (2018), an embedded social experiment in a US public high school.
- Recognised by the White House, the United Nations, and the Prime Minister of Canada for achievements in community leadership.
- Keynote speaker for Google, Disney, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, PwC, YPO, TD Bank, Shopify, Kaiser Permanente, Netflix, and Coca-Cola.
- Featured by Forbes, People Magazine, Larry King, and Oprah.
Biography
Most large employers now lose people not for reasons their engagement surveys can name. Compensation, perks, and policy are not the friction point. Belonging is. The organisations that retain talent in this environment are the ones treating workplace community as an operating problem rather than a soft one.
Shane Feldman’s career has been an unusually direct route into that problem. He founded Count Me In in 2008 as a teenager in Toronto after a difficult school transition; the organisation has since grown into a social entrepreneurship incubator with members across 104 countries and more than 30,000 ventures initiated. The work has been recognised by the White House, the United Nations, and the Prime Minister of Canada.
The frameworks he brings to corporate audiences come from two sources that rarely sit together. One is operator experience running a global organisation built around commitment, service, and retention. The other is field research; Feldman has embedded in more than 100 cities across six continents to study how communities form and hold. He translates that into structured tools for HR, sales, and leadership audiences, packaged as “Passport” keynotes covering team retention, customer loyalty, future-of-work, and AI integration.
The corporate roster reflects how the work travels. Google, Disney, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, PwC, YPO, TD Bank, Shopify, Kaiser Permanente, Netflix, and Coca-Cola have all booked him on engagement, culture, and retention briefs. His 2018 turn in A&E’s “Undercover High”, embedded for a semester in a Kansas public high school, is the kind of credential that signals a researcher willing to spend time inside the system he is describing.
Key speaking topics
- Workplace community and belonging
- Employee engagement and retention
- Customer loyalty and relationship-driven sales
- Future of work and hybrid team performance
- Humanising AI in the workplace
- Inclusive and community-centred leadership
- Talent attraction and culture design
Ideal for
- CHROs and CPOs running engagement, retention, and culture programmes
- Sales and customer success leaders rebuilding loyalty in low-trust markets
- Conferences focused on the future of work, hybrid productivity, and AI integration
- Membership organisations (YPO, EO, professional bodies) addressing community and connection
Audience outcomes
- A clear read on why engagement and retention initiatives fail when they treat community as a soft outcome.
- Practical mechanisms for building belonging at team and organisation level, drawn from Count Me In’s operating playbook.
- A vocabulary for talking about workplace community that connects people strategy to commercial outcomes.
- A set of usable frames for integrating AI into work without eroding the human relationships that drive retention.
Talks
A keynote on building team cultures that hold under pressure of attrition and change.
Key takeaways:
- How community-centred leadership shifts retention from a defensive HR cost to a performance lever
- Practical mechanisms for empowering teams without losing accountability
- Frameworks for attracting talent through cultural signal rather than compensation arms race
A keynote on integrating AI into work without breaking the relationships that drive engagement and retention.
Key takeaways:
- Where AI augments and where it corrodes workplace community
- How to redesign team rituals and customer touchpoints around AI capability
- A test for any AI implementation: does it deepen relationships or thin them?
A keynote on building organisational resilience through connection, in hybrid and distributed work environments.
Key takeaways:
- Why connection is the underrated variable in hybrid productivity
- Operating habits that create collaboration across location, generation, and function
- How distributed teams build trust at speed
A keynote on the shift from transactional sales to community-driven customer loyalty.
Key takeaways:
- Why traditional loyalty programmes underperform in low-trust markets
- The relationship architecture behind customers who return without incentive
- A diagnostic for where sales organisations leak loyalty
A keynote on rebuilding the employee value proposition around belonging and contribution.
Key takeaways:
- The specific gap between engagement scores and actual commitment
- How to design onboarding, recognition, and exit as community events, not HR processes
- Where retention spend is wasted and where it compounds