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Jackie Handy is an award-winning keynote speaker, author and workplace culture expert on a mission to help people feel safe, valued and understood at work.
With more than 30 years’ experience in senior leadership, learning and development, recruitment and inclusion, Jackie understands what people need to thrive. She helps organisations create workplaces where belonging and purpose drive engagement, performance and long-term success.
As the creator of The Matter Model®, Jackie has developed a practical framework that helps leaders identify culture gaps and build environments where people and organisations flourish. Her work focuses on the powerful connection between belonging, purpose and performance, showing leaders how small, everyday actions can create meaningful and lasting change.
Jackie’s insights have been featured by HR Magazine and the BBC, and she is the author of The Matter Model: How Great Leaders Build Belonging, Strengthen Purpose and Drive Engagement at Work, published by Routledge.
Her TEDx talk, The Exclusive Nature of Inclusion, was later selected for the main TED.com platform, extending her message to a global audience.
Recognised for her ability to combine powerful storytelling with practical takeaways, Jackie was commended for ‘Best Storyteller’ at the UK Speaker Awards. Her keynotes are immersive, engaging and action-focused, leaving audiences inspired to think differently and equipped to make meaningful changes in their workplaces.
Having worked with organisations including Tesco, Google, Merck and Amgen, Jackie has helped leaders and teams across the world strengthen culture, improve connection and boost engagement. Drawing on both lived experience and professional expertise, she challenges organisations to move beyond good intentions and create workplaces where everyone can belong and contribute at their best.
Beyond her professional work, Jackie is a passionate advocate for inclusion, a long-term fundraiser for Dementia UK and an enthusiastic long-distance hiker. Her experiences, including walking the Camino de Santiago, continue to shape her perspective on resilience, connection and what truly matters in life and work.
Whether speaking to a global conference audience or facilitating a leadership event, Jackie delivers fresh insights, relatable stories and practical strategies that help organisations build stronger cultures and achieve lasting impact.
You already care deeply about inclusion.
You know that when people feel they must shrink, mask, edit or protect themselves at work, they cannot fully contribute. And when people do not feel they belong, your business loses honesty, creativity, trust and talent.
This keynote closes the gap between good intentions and everyday impact.
It gives audiences a way to think about belonging that is practical, personal and immediately useful – built through a series of small but powerful human choices.
In this keynote, audiences are invited to look beyond the language of inclusion and into the lived experience of it.
Audiences will leave with a long list of no-cost actions to help people feel safe, valued and understood.
What does it really feel like to belong?
And what is the impact when you don’t?
Jackie shares part of her own inclusion story: the moments that shaped her understanding of what it means to be seen, judged, to belong, to adapt, and to find the courage to finally take up space as herself.
This keynote explores why belonging is so much more than what we say. It lives in how we notice, listen, include, challenge and act with one another in the small moments, every day.
AUDIENCES LEAVE WITH
IDEAL FOR
DELIVERED AS
The way people experience work shapes the way they perform at work.
Leaders are being asked to deliver more, often with less time, greater complexity and a higher emotional load. At the same time, team members want to feel seen, valued, trusted and connected to work that has meaning. Culture can no longer be something organisations talk about; it must be something people can feel, trust and act on every day.
This keynote closes that gap.
Built around Jackie Handy’s international book, The Matter Model: How Great Leaders Build Belonging, Strengthen Purpose and Drive Engagement at Work, this keynote gives leaders a practical way to build robust, resilient teams ready for the change happening now – and the change still to come.
From the book The Matter Model®
How Great Leaders Build Belonging, Strengthen Purpose and Drive Engagement at Work
Do I matter here?
Does the work I do here matter?
This is not a fluffy talk about “being nice”. It is a commercially relevant keynote about building healthy, human-centred workplaces where people stay, contribute and do their best work.
AUDIENCES LEAVE WITH
IDEAL FOR
DELIVERED AS
Jackie took the time to research our company’s values and use them to prompt ideas for small but important changes we can make as individuals.
Feedback from our colleagues has been that this was particularly impactful, and I’ve seen evidence of these actions being put into place already.
Feedback since has been great with employees already recognising the need for change and considering things in a different light. Jackie’s tone of voice and character shone through which is what engaged people most, as they felt they could resonate, saying she was so spot on with everything she said
