April Hansen
- Workforce Expert
- Hyper-Growth Leader
Topic Categories:
Discover Your Leading Edge, Build a Stronger Connection to Work, and Energize Personal and Professional Growth
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From being a small-town nurse to a tech entrepreneur to an award-winning leader of a multi-billion dollar organization, April Hansen has become one of the nation’s leading experts on employee engagement, workforce strategy, and hyper-growth leadership. Featured by TEDx, Forbes, and the New York Times, April’s insights explore fresh research and ideas to help individuals discover their leading edge, build a stronger connection to their work, and energize growth personally and professionally.
For April, inspiration isn’t something that’s only found in incredible feats of an Olympic athlete or heroic wartime survival stories. It is found in everyday people who do their work well, face their human doubts, and find a way to thrive. April is inspired by these people because she is one of them.
Forging her way from a small farm town in Wisconsin to becoming one of the nation’s foremost experts on workforce activation and hypergrowth leadership, April has carved a path of passion-oriented success fueled by curiosity and unapologetic courage. April’s entrepreneurial zest has shaped her career journey from being a frustrated nurse to a high-powered business executive. April’s accomplishments demonstrate that personal success and professional satisfaction are attainable for all.
In April’s business of healthcare, the stakes are often life or death. Turnover, widespread chaos, and bureaucracy plagued our fragile healthcare ecosystem even before the pandemic. Today, as our nation recovers, the lessons learned in healthcare serve to inform businesses everywhere on how to pivot quickly amidst turmoil, build a foundation of hope and happiness to help workforces heal, and to create a magnetic culture that overcomes even the toughest circumstances.
Using lessons gleaned from high-stakes work, April shares impactful and inspiring strategies for leaders to extinguish stagnation, expunge competitive threats, and express new creativity. Leaders experience a renewed excitement and freedom to do what they do best – lead.
April’s leadership insights have been called upon by CBS, CNBC, Forbes, NPR, New York Times Magazine, Modern Healthcare, Business Insider, The Daily, and a host of other organizations. April was awarded the 2019 Wisconsin Nurse Leader of the Year, was named to Becker’s List of Rising Healthcare Stars in 2018, Staffing Industry Analysts’ “40 Under 40” list in 2019 and Staffing Industry Analysts’ Global Power 150 – Women in Staffing in 2021 and 2020. April is an active mom, snowmobiler, squeaky cheese curd aficionado, and can typically be found on the weekends slinging pizza with her husband in their family-owned pizzeria.
We entered the COVID-19 pandemic with a tight labor market characterized by stiff employer competition, increasingly complex skill needs, and growing demands for better work environments. After years of navigating dynamic change, organizations are now battling burnout and turnover at unprecedented rates. Despite this dismal current state, evidence is mounting on what organizations can do to protect their most precious assets – their people.
After helping to lead the largest deployment of healthcare workers in our nation’s history, workforce expert April Hansen leans on lessons learned from America’s fractured frontlines to share powerful strategies for organizations to rebuild and repair their teams. Ultimately, April’s insights allow organizations to take actionable steps towards a happy work environment where individuals thrive, and organizations grow.
In H.O.P.E. for Happy, leaders learn an evidence-based approach to:
H: Help their workforce find healing to protect and advance individual wellbeing
O: Operationalize the organizational change needed for workforce happiness to stick
P: Prevent practices and policies from undermining purpose
E: Enlist whole-company support to prioritize the employee experience before profits
This thought-provoking session explores fresh research and helps leaders create effective retention strategies to future-proof their workforce. Attendees leave this session empowered to:
Act on solving complex workforce challenges
Build new hope with fresh ideas
Cultivate a culture rooted in happiness
Decades of business literature convinced us of the health hazards associated with too much attachment to work. Current strategies endorse striking a work/life balance that encourages individuals to think of their work as separate from their lives. However, the results we have in our workforce today have never been more abysmal.
We now deal with employee detachment, disengagement, and burnout at rates never before seen. Employers everywhere are searching for a tourniquet to stop the turnover bleeding from their organizations, all while wondering how to promote stronger ties to their company mission, culture, and purpose.
Despite this dismal current state, evidence is mounting on what organizations can do to protect their most precious assets – their people.
Leaning on her own career lessons from being a small-town nurse, fully connected emotionally to her work, to now helping to lead a multi-billion dollar organization, April Hansen shares powerful strategies for individuals to discover their own unique emotional “edges,” how to deploy them in the workplace to stand out, and ultimately how to use their edges to foster healthier attachment to each other and to their job.
Featured by TEDx, April’s insights allow organizations to take actionable steps towards a happy work environment where individuals thrive and organizations grow.
In Make the Call, April helps organizations that are suffering from growth challenges, stifled productivity and whose leaders are suffocating due to decision drowning syndrome. She applies lessons learned from helping to lead the largest deployment of healthcare personnel in history, aiding in saving hundreds of thousands of lives while the business simultaneously grew by 9x in two years. Audiences are inspired by her simple three-part framework to make fewer, higher-quality decisions that result not only in stimulating growth and productivity, but also allow leaders to take a breath and fall back in love with their own lives.
The Make the Call message is ideal for making an impact on both an individual and organizational level. For individuals, the message inspires reflection, growth and ultimately empowerment in the face of our continually evolving national, corporate and personal dilemmas. At an organizational level, this message is an actionable call to rethink how a corporation or institution can structure its policies and culture to foster growth and drive faster, better results.
Organizational leaders will feel a tangible impact within days of April’s presentation as leaders at every level recognize their voice, use their potential, and activate change to generate new business value.
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