Resiliency of Faith in the workplace
Sharelle Dayco & Lavonne Stewart
Room 206
In today’s fast-paced and often stressful work environment, maintaining resilience is critical. The Resiliency of Faith in the Workplace workshop explores how personal faith, regardless of religious background, can serve as a powerful foundation for building resilience in the workplace. This session focuses on the role of faith in enhancing perseverance, emotional well-being, and a sense of purpose amid the challenges of the modern work environment.
Through this workshop, participants will learn how integrating faith and values into their work can promote resilience, strengthen relationships, and boost both individual and organizational well-being. By tapping into the strength of personal belief systems, employees and leaders alike can develop the inner resources needed to navigate adversity with a sense of hope and purpose.
Sharelle Dayco
Director of People + Culture at Novacom Building Partners
Sharelle is the Director of People + Culture for a Commercial Construction company called Novacom Building Partners. She is a co-owner with her brother, and they lead the company alongside an amazing leadership team. They build some really unique projects. She loves driving around and seeing the mark they have made around the city! Her role is to grow and develop the team while ensuring she maintains the tight-knit culture they have worked hard to build over 30 years. She loves her work, and feels a deep sense of calling to serve her team well.
She’s been married for 14 years to Matt, her amazing introspective husband. She has an amazing daughter named Bronwyn (7). She’s often trying to juggle the balance of trying to achieve my goals at work, and being present as a parent. It's often a hard balance to find! She loves reading theology books, discovering new bands, going camping, eating tacos and going to farmers markets. Most of all, she loves people: getting to know them and developing meaningful friendships.
She has two degrees – in English & History and Education. She actually started out her career as a teacher before transitioning to my current role. She is passionate about seeing faith and work integrate. She has gone to Faith + Work conferences in New York, and Texas and been inspired by leaders who are developing a Christ-centered vision for flourishing in their workplaces. She also took a course locally at Regent College on how to integrate our vocations into community engagement. She has also read a number of books to help develop these ideas further. Throughout this journey, she has really begun to understand God's specific calling on her life and how that comes to life in my work. She is very excited to work alongside all the participants of this workshop to develop your own unique vision of where God has called you in your work!
Lavonne Stewart
Partner at L. Neville & Company
As a partner at L. Neville & Company, a small yet thriving public accounting firm, Lavonne specializes in cross-border individual tax. Her role is to assist individuals in filing their Canadian and US tax returns, guiding them through the intricate world of cross-border taxation. What she finds most fulfilling is being able to demystify tax for my clients, making it understandable and less daunting. She is deeply honoured that her clients place their trust in her as their accountant.
Before being a partner at L. Neville & Company, she worked for 12 years at other accounting firms. She started as a junior accountant at a small local firm of 70 people and ended as a senior manager at a national firm of more than 8,000 people. During these years, she learned a lot of technical tax knowledge and navigated workplace politics, confidence issues, middle management frustration, interpersonal conflicts, and power dynamics. She was blessed to have a mentor who demonstrated how faith and work intersect to guide me in these years.
Outside of her professional life, she is a wife and a mother to two awesome children, Jack (8) and Wynnie (5). Balancing her career ambitions with her parenting responsibilities and desires is a continuous journey. She enjoys activities such as dancing, camping, and going for walks, and she is currently working on improving my culinary skills. These personal interests and experiences shape her perspective and approach to her work, making her a more empathetic and understanding accountant and employer.
She is interested in how work and faith play out in the day-to-day of our lives. While she loves the theological underpinning, she is most interested in answering the question, "How, then, shall we live?". Courses, reading, and prayer regarding her vocation, employment, and work over many years have helped her to broaden my understanding of her contribution to the world and how each of us participates in God's kingdom on earth through our work. Lavonne looks forward to journeying with you as you hopefully uncover a greater calling and purpose to your work.