Kelly Mackin
Engagement surveys keep rising in cost and falling in usefulness. Leaders sense the gap between what well-being programmes promise and what employees actually need, but the data they collect treats workforces as one population with one hierarchy of needs. The result is well-being spend that does not move retention, performance, or the lived experience of work.
Kelly Mackin is a human behaviour researcher and CEO of Motives Met who helps leaders rebuild workplace well-being around individual human needs rather than universal engagement models.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Kelly Mackin
- A research instrument leaders can actually use. The Motives Met Human Needs Assessment surfaces the 28 psychological, emotional, and social needs that drive a specific employee, team, or culture, replacing one-size-fits-all engagement scores with personalised data.
- A direct challenge to universal hierarchy thinking. Mackin’s research argues that Maslow-style and engagement-survey frameworks misrepresent how needs actually distribute across a workforce, and gives leaders a defensible alternative.
- Award-winning published work. Work Life Well-Lived is a Nonfiction Authors Association Bronze Award winner and an Amazon best-seller in its category, giving senior buyers a citable reference point.
- Practical depth beyond keynote theatre. Mackin trained as a cognitive behavioural coach and meditation teacher and runs assessments, workshops, and leadership accelerators, so the keynote connects to a delivery system the organisation can run after she leaves.
Biography highlights
- CEO and co-founder, Motives Met, the workplace well-being platform behind her research.
- Author of Work Life Well-Lived: The Motives Met Pathway to No-B.S. Well-Being at Work (Greenleaf Book Group, 2024).
- Nonfiction Authors Association Bronze Book Award winner.
- Creator of the Motives Met Human Needs Assessment, identifying 28 motives that drive thriving at work.
- BA in Communications, Wittenberg University; certified cognitive behavioural therapy practitioner and meditation teacher.
- Host of DisruptHR San Diego; featured in Authority Magazine and the Human Capital Innovations webinar series.
Biography
Most workplace well-being programmes assume that everyone is motivated by the same things in roughly the same order. That assumption shapes every engagement survey, every wellness benefit, every “top reasons people quit” list. It is also wrong. Kelly Mackin’s research at Motives Met identifies 28 distinct psychological, emotional, and social motives, and shows that the ranking varies sharply between individuals, teams, and roles.
The work sits inside Motives Met, the platform she co-founded and leads as CEO. Its core instrument, the Human Needs Assessment, surfaces an individual’s top motives and maps them against the conditions a manager or organisation is actually providing. The output is a usable diagnostic for leaders who have run out of patience with engagement scores that do not tell them what to do next.
Her 2024 book, Work Life Well-Lived: The Motives Met Pathway to No-B.S. Well-Being at Work, became an Amazon category best-seller and won a Bronze Book Award from the Nonfiction Authors Association. The technical foundation comes from her training as a cognitive behavioural therapy practitioner and meditation teacher, which she pairs with quantitative research methods to keep the framework empirical rather than inspirational.
For HR and culture leaders, the relevance is operational. Mackin gives them a vocabulary for the gap between what a workforce reports on a survey and what individual people actually need from their work, and a measurement layer they can act on across hybrid teams, multigenerational workforces, and post-restructure cultures.
Key speaking topics
- Workplace well-being and the science of thriving at work
- Psychological needs and motivation at work
- Human-first leadership and management practice
- Stress, burnout, and work-life harmony
- Psychological safety and emotional inclusion
- Culture design for hybrid and multigenerational teams
Ideal for
- CHROs and heads of people redesigning engagement and well-being strategy
- Culture, DEI, and talent leaders responsible for retention and inclusion outcomes
- Senior managers and team leaders running large or multigenerational teams
- Leadership development and L&D heads designing manager capability programmes
Audience outcomes
- A working understanding of the 28 motives framework and how it differs from Maslow and engagement-survey models
- Specific questions leaders can ask their teams to surface individual motives, not just aggregate sentiment
- A diagnostic lens on where current well-being and engagement spend is misaligned with actual employee needs
- Language and structure for conversations on burnout, work-life harmony, and psychological safety
- A clearer link between well-being investment and performance outcomes leaders can defend internally
Talks
A research-led keynote on the 28 human motives that drive workplace performance and well-being, and what managers do differently when they lead from individual needs rather than universal frameworks.
Key takeaways:
- Why universal hierarchies of need misrepresent the data on what employees actually want
- The manager behaviours that consistently meet motives across hybrid and multigenerational teams
- How to use the Human Needs Assessment to convert engagement data into management action
A leadership keynote framing motive literacy as a senior management capability, with practical structures for stay interviews, one-to-ones, and team design.
Key takeaways:
- A vocabulary for the motives behind retention, performance, and disengagement
- How to run stay interviews that produce usable information
- Where leaders typically misread their teams, and the questions that correct it
A keynote on the personal and organisational practice of work-life harmony, drawing on Mackin’s six pillars framework and CBT-informed methods.
Key takeaways:
- Why work-life balance frames have failed in hybrid and always-on environments
- The six pillars of work-life harmony and where organisations can intervene
- Individual practices employees can take into their own work, supported by manager behaviours