Karen Eber Workplace Culture Keynote Speaker
What if Dolly Parton Wrote ‘9 to 5’ Today?
Most workplace habits were built for an office, a hierarchy, and a workforce that no longer exists. This keynote helps leaders decide what to keep and what to leave behind.
Keynote Overview
What If Dolly Parton Wrote "9 to 5" Today?
When "9 to 5" hit the radio, the workplace ran on rules everyone recognized: a shift that started and ended at a fixed hour, a manager who was in the room to notice you, and a hierarchy that decided who got heard, promoted, and believed. Those rules didn't disappear when the workplace changed. They just stopped matching how people actually work.
Hybrid schedules, AI-assisted work, distributed teams, and a workforce with different expectations of leadership have changed the job. Many leadership habits have not caught up. Meetings still assume everyone is in a room. Trust still gets built on being seen at a desk. Feedback still runs on a review cycle built for a slower, more predictable world.
In this keynote, Karen Eber asks audiences a direct question: if you were writing the rules of work today, would you write the ones you actually follow? Drawing on neuroscience, organizational psychology, and her experience as Head of Culture and Chief Learning Officer at GE and Head of Leadership Development at Deloitte, Karen helps leaders separate the habits still doing real work from the ones running on autopilot. Through her work, Karen has educated and inspired more than 3 million people globally, including 2.25M+ views on her TED Talk. Audiences leave with a clear-eyed audit of the assumptions shaping their team and a short list of what to test, keep, or retire.
Audience Takeaways:
Name the workplace assumptions still shaping decisions on their team, even the ones no one has said out loud.
Tell the difference between a leadership habit that's outdated and one that's still doing real work.
Replace command-and-control defaults with leadership behaviors built for distributed, AI-assisted teams.
Build trust and accountability without relying on visibility or facetime.
Lead with curiosity when a habit gets questioned, instead of defending it on reflex.
Walk out with a specific list of what to keep, what to retire, and what to test next.
Format: 45–60 minutes | Any audience size | In-person or virtual
stylus Who is This Keynote For?
Executive leadership teams
People leaders at every level
HR, Learning & Development, and People & Culture professionals
Future of Work, leadership, and workplace culture conferences
Organizations navigating a hybrid or return-to-office policy debate, a generational shift on their team, or a broader push to modernize how they lead
show_chart Why Organizations Hire This Keynote:
To separate the habits worth keeping from the ones inherited without a decision.
To name the unintended message a leader sends every time they default to an old norm: an in-office-only schedule, a once-a-year review, a promotion pattern nobody's questioned.
To give people leaders a practical alternative to "that's how we've always done it."
To equip leaders with agility to respond to disruptions and change.
To align leadership practice with the workforce, technology, and expectations the organization actually has today, not the one it was built around.
To open a real conversation about outdated norms without it turning into a complaint session about "kids these days."
What Makes Karen Eber’s Workplace Culture Keynotes Different?
Most keynotes about the changing workplace read like trend reports: generational labels, hybrid work statistics, or assumptions about what different groups want.
Karen approaches it differently. She built and led culture and leadership development inside two of the world's largest organizations, where these issues affected real employees, real decisions, and real business outcomes.
Through her work, Karen has educated and inspired more than 3 million people globally, including 2.25M+ views on her TED Talk and her bestselling book, The Perfect Story.
Build from Inside Organizations
Karen Eber has shaped culture and leadership inside complex organizations as Head of Culture and Chief Learning Officer at General Electric and Head of Leadership Development at Deloitte, giving her firsthand experience with the challenges leaders face when building culture at scale.
Grounded in Research and Real Experience
Karen combines behavioral science, research, and lessons from leading culture and leadership initiatives inside global organizations to give audiences practical actions they can apply immediately.
Create Culture in Everyday Actions
Karen helps leaders understand that culture is not defined only by values statements or corporate messaging. It is created through the everyday behaviors leaders reward, decisions they make, and experiences employees have at work.
Want more on Karen's background and how she works with organizations? Visit the About page or the Speaking FAQ.
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See Karen Speak
The Rules of Work Were Written By Someone. Are They Still Right?
Every organization runs on rules. A start time, the way decisions get made, the way feedback delivered and promotions are awarded.
Most of those rules were never voted on. They were inherited, from a manager, from "how it's always been," from a workplace that ran nine to five out of an office.
The question isn't whether your team has rules. It's whether anyone has checked if they still work. Organizations are great at starting things and slow to modify or remove them.
The organizations pulling ahead right now aren't the ones with the newest perks or the loudest culture perks.
They're the ones willing to audit their defaults: which habits build trust today, and which ones are leftover from a workplace that no longer exists.
Frequently Asked Questions About This Keynote
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It's a keynote by Karen Eber that examines which workplace norms and leadership habits are outdated, and which ones still earn their place. Using the question "what if Dolly Parton wrote '9 to 5' today," Karen helps leaders audit the assumptions shaping how their team works, communicates, and makes decisions.
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Workplace culture is created through the habits leaders repeat, not the values they publish. Every meeting format, feedback cycle, and promotion decision either reinforces an old norm or builds a new one.
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Leaders set culture through what they reward, ignore, and repeat, more than through what they say. This keynote focuses specifically on the leadership defaults inherited from an earlier era of work and how to replace the ones that no longer serve today's teams.
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"What Story Does Your Culture Tell?" explains the mechanism: how culture forms and spreads through the stories employees tell about leadership behavior. This keynote applies that thinking to a specific problem, the outdated workplace norms and leadership defaults many organizations are still running on. Organizations often book them together: one to understand how culture forms, the other to audit which parts of their current culture are worth keeping.
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Yes. It's frequently delivered to executive teams, people leaders, and HR/L&D audiences working through hybrid work policy, generational shifts, or leadership development.
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Yes. Karen was Head of Culture and Chief Learning Officer at GE and Head of Leadership Development at Deloitte before advising organizations on it. She's been in the room where these decisions get made.
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Yes. It works well as a kickoff for a broader look at workplace norms, hybrid policy, or leadership development, and pairs with Karen's Culture Transformation consulting work.
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It's a culture keynote focused on workplace norms and leadership behavior. Leadership-specific content, including how AI is changing the skills leaders need, is covered in Karen's separate keynote, "The Human Advantage: Leadership Skills AI Can't Replace."
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Organizations reexamining how they lead: return-to-office and hybrid policy debates, a generational shift on a team, or a broader initiative to modernize leadership practices.
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Yes. Karen customizes examples and takeaways for your industry, audience, and specific workplace challenges through a pre-event call.
Have additional questions? Planning a keynote often comes with questions about topics, customization, workshops, travel, audience size, fees, and what to expect. Visit the Frequently Asked Questions page for answers to many of the questions organizers ask before booking Karen.
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A delight to work with from start to finish!
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