Lauren Smith Brody

By the most conservative estimate, 45% of employees are caregivers in their personal lives, responsible for their children, their aging parents, and often, both. In this talk, Brody lays out how to retain stressed-out, talented working parents and how to innovate alongside them toward a Great Reimagining of work. Sharing the strategies she's developed for her consulting clients in tech, big law, finance, and the service industry, Brody defines the benefits, opportunities, and culture that prevent discrimination and keep women and parents in the pipeline to leadership—all endorsed by evidence-backed research on the return on investment for caregiver support.

In this time of transition, working caregivers and employers alike are struggling to find balance. Lauren Smith Brody offers concrete advice for protecting one’s time, energy, and mental health during the ramp-up to COVID-19 recovery. She argues that the lessons in gender equity learned during the pandemic need to be applied long-term to create a truly equitable working world for all. With her expertise in advising companies and working caregivers, she addresses shifting needs in regard to childcare, how organizations can step up to attract and retain parents, how to help employees bridge the emotional and academic gaps that their children endured during the pandemic, and offers practical strategies for building in stability and productivity at work and at home. This talk can be customized for working caregivers and/or managers and executives.

In our “new normal,” working parents have found themselves struggling to balance all their responsibilities at home and in the virtual workspace. Lauren Smith Brody is here to help caregivers preserve their mental health, adapt to their evolving workplaces, and find mutual employee/employer support during this difficult time. In her empowering lecture, Brody provides working caregivers with all the strategies they need to work remotely with children at home, including tactics for productivity amid the chaos and evidence-based ideas for protecting our kids’ wellbeing during stressful world events like these. Brody also emphasizes the importance of caregivers protecting and maintaining their time and equality, both at work and at home, including a solid plan for creating a fair division of labor in two-parent homes.

In talks specially geared to managers looking to better support the needs of working parents, Lauren Smith Brody shares what she learned from 800+ new working moms and 100+ studies and experts for her bestselling book The Fifth Trimester, as well as the thousands of moms and dads she worked with throughout the pandemic. Brody makes the case for investing in parents through the tricky transitions of working parenthood, which keeps women in the pipeline to leadership, fosters gender equity (lifting profits, and preventing discrimination), and has long term ripple effects on the division of labor at home, too. Brody covers her most-recommended best practices in talks customizable to your organization’s needs.

The Fifth Trimester founder and author Lauren Smith Brody gives parents a close-up look at what she learned from 800+ new working moms and 100+ studies and experts for her bestselling book The Fifth Trimester . If the first three trimesters are for pregnancy, and the fourth is newborn stretch, the fifth—the return to work—is a developmental phase that has long-term impact on employee retention and satisfaction. Whether new parents in your workplace are leaning in or just muddling through, Brody’s judgment-free advice for this transition will help them help themselves—and ultimately improve workplace culture for all families.