Lewis Eisen

TEC Canada Speaker | Coach | Facilitator | Policy Drafting Expert – Perfect Policies | Vistage Speaker

Lewis Eisen is the developer of the Perfect Policies™ approach to using respectful language in policy drafting, which has influenced organizations in countries around the world. The 4th edition of his international bestseller was released in 2024, and is now titled Rules: Powerful Policy Wording to Maximize Engagement. Lewis draws on 40 years’ combined experience as a practicing lawyer, business consultant, and federal civil servant.

Lewis Eisen

TEC Canada Speaker | Coach | Facilitator | Policy Drafting Expert – Perfect Policies | Vistage Speaker

Lewis Eisen is the developer of the Perfect Policies™ approach to using respectful language in policy drafting, which has influenced organizations in countries around the world. The 4th edition of his international bestseller was released in 2024, and is now titled Rules: Powerful Policy Wording to Maximize Engagement. Lewis draws on 40 years’ combined experience as a practicing lawyer, business consultant, and federal civil servant.

Lewis’s Topics

In a healthy workplace, employee compliance with corporate policies should come from willing cooperation, not coerced obedience. Many organizations focus on fostering a culture of collaboration and respect but often fail to reflect these values in their written rules, which can sound authoritarian and undermine trust. In this session, Lewis will show how the tone of policies directly affects employee engagement, offering strategies to reword rules in a respectful, informative manner while maintaining their strictness. By aligning policy language with your organization’s values, you can foster trust, respect, and a positive workplace culture.

This session gives senior leaders a diagnostic framework to recognize the harmful messages their policies are already sending and to assess where the misalignment between policy voice and target culture is most acute. From there, the conversation turns to strategy: how to build the internal capacity to fix it, which functions need to be at the table (Legal, GRC, HR, Marketing and Communications, and others all have a stake and often competing instincts), and where accountability for policy voice needs to be set. A Global Head of Information Security who examined his organization’s written rules through this lens saw employees proactively approaching his team to flag potential compliance gaps and ask for guidance, rather than concealing non-compliance and hoping for the best. That shift in employee behaviour is a direct risk management outcome.

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