Jonathan Villaire

Jonathan Villaire is an employee experience leader at Point32Health, a leading not-for-profit health and wellbeing organization built from the merger of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Tufts Health Plan. He is also a lawyer, certified professional coach, and the author of The Stepford Employee Fallacy: The Truth about Employee Engagement in the Modern Workplace.

You Can't Mistreat Employees and Expect Them to Be Happy, High-Performing Robots

Jonathan's book takes direct aim at what he calls the "Stepford Employee Fallacy": the unspoken managerial assumption that employees should show up happy, committed, and high-performing regardless of how they're actually treated. Drawing on brain science, third-party research, and his own front-line consulting experience, he argues that most business leaders rely on faulty, old-school assumptions about what actually creates genuine engagement. His practical fix is to treat employees more like consumers who are choosing where to spend their talent, not captive labor who owe loyalty by default, and to focus on how to stop actively disengaging people before trying to engage them with new programs. He describes himself as a bridge builder, truth teller, and advocate for empathy, and has been featured in the Boston Globe and on HR.com.

Topics Jonathan speaks on

• The Stepford Employee Fallacy: why old assumptions about engagement fail
• Treating employees like consumers choosing where to spend their talent
• How to stop disengaging employees before trying to engage them
• Employee experience through the lens of brain science
• Empathetic leadership in large, complex organizations

Connect

• Jonathan Villaire on LinkedIn
• Point32Health

Want more on what it actually takes to stop disengaging employees before trying to re-engage them? Learn more about the Achieve Leadership Network.