Seeking Fairness at Work: Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention & Satisfaction

WINNER of 26 business book awards including the prestigious Axiom (2025) and Goody (2024) awards.

Seeking Fairness at Work challenges employer “truths” by examining unwritten workplace norms – the invisible lines that when crossed, create organizational dysfunction. This new perspective on employee engagement explains employees’ legitimate frustration and identifies missed management opportunities to improve workplace culture.

Recognized business strategist and Journal of Business Ethics Education editorial board member Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, MBA, JD identifies the five most common workplace norms that betray fairness, leaving employees feeling dispirited, disengaged, and headed for the door by examining the social psychology of how our basic human motivations intersect with the implied workplace social contract.

Clarion Foreward Reviews calls her recent book Seeking Fairness at Work: Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention & Satisfaction “pithy and persuasive,” while BookLife Review compares it to Kim Scott’s Radical Respect and Kim Dabb’s You Belong Here.

Using evidence-based science, academic research, interviews, and real-life stories, Hasl-Kelchner merges organizational psychology with the practical aspects of workplace dynamics to offer ethical leadership an actionable five-part framework filled with practical tips to empower more employee engagement and retention, including chapters on how to:

• Rebuild Trust with More Self-Awareness
• Improve Relationship Chemistry with More Empathy
• Make Genuine Accountability a Cornerstone
• Maintain a Cultural Safety Net
• Mend the Structural Safety Net

Seeking Fairness at Work is ideal for executives, managers, and entrepreneurs who want to raise their employees’ game instead of their defenses; the human resource professionals, consultants, and employment attorneys who advise them; and employees wanting a reality check of their own workplace experiences.

Hanna Hasl-Kelchner empowers organizations to make more informed decisions by simplifying complex concepts into sensible, bite size pieces that provide clarity and generate stronger management options. She accomplishes it as a business strategist through her writing, speaking, consulting, and popular Business Confidential Now podcast as the Founder and President of Business M.O., LLC.

A recognized business expert, her no nonsense approach is grounded in hands-on business experience, growing up in an entrepreneurial family and running a business before age 30, together with decades as a practicing business attorney. 

As a trusted advisor her international business and legal career have spanned government, private, and in-house practice. She's worked with companies that were growing, shrinking, merging, winning, struggling, private, public, large, and small. Plus, she's had the privilege of being on the faculty at two top ranked MBA programs: The Duke University Fuqua School of Management and the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business. 

Hanna is also the author of The Business Guide to Legal Literacy (Jossey-Bass, 2006), an Amazon best seller and proudly serves as a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Business Ethics Education (2002 - present).  

Other accolades include being recognized by Dun and Bradstreet as a Twitter #BizInfluencer in the Specialty Strategy category (before Twitter became X) and called "a lawyer you can love" by a Chicken Soup for the Soul co-author. 
 
Her formal education includes an undergraduate degree from Duke University, an MBA from Cornell University, and a JD from the Rutgers University School of Law -- Camden.