Lori Winters

Vice President Total Rewards

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As a proven strategic and innovative leader focused on improving the Employee experience, Lori Winters achieves lasting results through creative problem solving, new capabilities, effective organizational change leadership, and development of high performing teams.

Lori is the Vice President of Total Rewards for Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, the nation's largest airline in terms of domestic Customer boardings. In her role, she provides executive leadership for compensation and retirement, labor and benefits strategy, and nonrevenue travel privileges and other employee perks—all designed to attract, retain, and enable the people of Southwest to live and work well throughout their employee journey and into retirement. In past roles at Southwest, Lori established the Employee Experience, Employee Insights, and Change Leadership capabilities and teams and served in a strategy and projects role for the Customer Support & Services department. She has been involved in many successful Southwest Airlines efforts, such as the All-New Rapid Rewards™ program and the AirTran integration and has led the successful creation and launch of Southwest's Voice of Employee and Awards and Recognition strategies. Prior to joining Southwest Airlines in 2006, she was a Human Capital Consultant with Deloitte Consulting for eight years where she specialized in organizational transformation.

Lori is passionate about serving others and is an active member of her church. In addition, she supports Mission Regan, who's faith-based vision is to collect surplus medical supplies and share them with those in need domestically and around the world, through fundraising activities. She also served on the FC Dallas Season Ticket Member Advisory Board.

Lori also believes in helping to expand the body of knowledge in her profession. She has served on the O.C. Tanner Advisory Council as well as the Conference Board's Employee Experience and Engagement Council. In her time with Deloitte Consulting, she contributed to The Heart of Change Field Guide (released 2005), authored by Deloitte Consulting Partner Dan Cohen. She has served as an active mentor and shared her professional knowledge through speaking engagements and custom sessions with numerous nonprofit and professional organizations throughout her career.

Under Lori's leadership, Southwest Airlines was honored with O.C. Tanner's 2023 Brand in Action Breakthrough Award for the employee awards and recognition program. In 2016, Lori received the Alumni of the Year award for the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Texas.

Lori graduated from Baylor University with a bachelor's degree in education and from the University of North Texas with a master's degree in communication studies. She and her husband David enjoy time with family, traveling, theater, and attending FC Dallas matches.