4 years as a futurist working with global brands has taught me that almost every engagement with a company has one common outcome. Each foresight exercise is different, but every leader involved realises that their organisation needs to be more agile to face what's coming. And while some of that agility can come from systems, the majority comes from people. Learning Agility is the human dimension of agile organisations. The ability of leaders to learn from experiences and then apply that learning to novel situations. 

What does HR look like when 80% of administrative complexity is handled by intelligent systems? This panel looks at the evolution of HR roles in an AI-first world. We will explore how AI-augmented workflows allow lean teams to manage massive global footprints, the new technical fluencies HR leaders need to develop, and how to maintain a "human-centric" culture when the backend is powered by machines.

Key takeaways:

• discover Strategic Scalability: Learn how automating 80% of admin tasks allows lean teams to manage massive global footprints.
• master Technical Fluency: Identify the specific digital competencies HR leaders need to navigate and lead an AI-first workforce.
• balance Human-Centricity: Gain strategies to protect empathy and culture when the backend is powered by machines

Menopause is a hot topic. It’s also a completely natural life stage affecting millions of working women - yet it remains one of the least understood and most stigmatized workplace experiences. This presentation presents key findings from Benenden Health’s “Missing From the Workplace” research, which recently surveyed 2,000 UK women aged 40–65, and 500 HR professionals, to gain an understanding of women's experiences, and compare to employer understanding and the support they offer.

Key Takeaways:

• discover why the Menopause creates significant barriers for women in the workplace. 
• learn how inaction has real consequences for wellbeing, performance, retention and organisational culture.
• find out how HR can lead meaningful change by implementing practical, evidence‑based support that helps women thrive at every stage of life

HR leaders are under pressure to modernise their function, deliver greater value to the business and make better workforce decisions, yet the people tech market is increasingly complex and noisy.

This session cuts through the hype to focus on the technologies that are genuinely delivering results for UK organisations. Drawing on real implementation experience, it explores how AI, automation and modern HR platforms are being used to improve efficiency, insight and employee experience, and where organisations are still getting it wrong.

You’ll leave with clearer priorities, stronger questions to ask your suppliers, and a more confident approach to shaping your people tech roadmap. 

Key takeaways:

• which people technologies are genuinely improving retention, performance, productivity and decision-making
• how to assess whether your organisation is truly ready for AI in HR
• common pitfalls in HR tech implementations and the change management lessons to learn now
• where to invest now, and what can safely wait.

Drawing on her expertise as a biological anthropologist, author and broadcaster, Prof. Alice Roberts will examine how diversity - across biology, culture, and lived experience can be a powerful asset. She will connect insights from human evolution and anthropology to today’s challenges, offering a fresh perspective on how we can harness difference to drive innovation, resilience, and performance.

The session will explore the dynamic relationship between people, environment, technology, and culture, revealing how these forces shape behaviour, decision-making, and organisational outcomes. 

Alice will also share her expertise in translating complex ideas into clear, compelling communication and how to engage with empathy and communicate with impact.

This session explores the tension between quick AI productivity gains vs long-term workforce capability, and whether strategic deceleration could be the answer.

Key takeaways:

• productivity tradeoff. How short-term gains masks long-term capability gaps.
• ways to measure skills loss and overall long-term productivity gains.
• how to build employee commitment to upskill
• strategic deceleration. Examples of how intentionally slowing down for meaningful human oversight and stretch tasks can strengthen mastery and dignity.

Not every employee has the same needs. We take a look at our data on how gender, sexuality, and neurodiversity influences employee needs – and the gaps this causes in wellbeing and benefits.

Key takeaways:

• the key to inclusive engagement
• the core people challenges of 2026
• how to address the different wellbeing needs of diverse populations
• six top tips to drive engagement for every employee

Discover how HR teams can link wellbeing programmes to productivity, retention, and business growth. This session provides practical strategies to secure budget and maximise the return on your wellbeing investment.

Key takeaways:

• dive into the metrics that matter to draw clearer lines between wellbeing programmes and their impact on productivity, retention and business growth
• build a compelling story for budget holders to secure investment and demonstrate the strategic value of employee wellbeing
• share practical strategies to maximise the return on your wellbeing investment and drive long term organisational success.

Inclusive leadership is much more than being ‘open-minded’, it’s a commitment to creating equitable, respectful and empowering workplaces for all employees. But how can leaders effectively showcase commitment to inclusivity? 

Key takeaways:

• discover how to lead with authenticity and transparency to build trust and accountability
• embed psychological safety whereby people feel seen, heard and valued
• making EDI a central business priority, aligning it with your organisation's core values and actions.

Pay reporting can be treated as a compliance task – published, parked and forgotten. When treated this way, organisations miss the opportunity to use the data to understand how work, reward, progression and access to opportunity actually operate in practice.

From April 2026 GB employers will be encouraged to voluntarily publish gender equality action plans and from April 2027 it will become manadatory. Organisations will be required to choose actions that support gender equality and menopause support at work. The organisational challenge is not producing the data, but turning mandatory reporting into business-relevant insight and tailored action. Join us for an interactive discussion to support you to identify and build the core components of an equality action plan that translates reporting requirements into practical, evidence-led action.

Key takeaways:

- How to develop an action plan blueprint to support future action plan requirements

- How combining pay reporting with wider people analytics can paint a detailed picture of the current state of play of equality within an organisation

- How to ensure action plans do not become another ‘tick box’ exercise, by defining clear priorities, ownership and measures of success

As AI becomes embedded in everyday HR practice, human-centred skills - empathy, emotional intelligence and ethical judgement - are more essential than ever. The challenge is understanding how technology can enhance, rather than replace, the human experience.

Key takeaways:

Learn how HR teams can design a practical, scalable tech toolkit that automates routine processes and frees valuable time for what truly matters, culture, connection and employee wellbeing. 

Data from over 3,000 leaders and teams show that teams are focusing on developing their Change Readiness based on the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) world we are in, but how do they take the next step in performance and how can their leaders help them be effective and connected? 

Key takeaways:

• our latest data on team and leader effectiveness and the most impactful development areas
• the rise in relational energisers within leadership - and the different impact through seniority levels
• our recommendations for HR/L&D leaders to help support their teams and leadership.

 This panel explores case studies and learnings on how organisations:

• do job design to raise performance without burnout
• implement ethical AI governance to scale AI use safely
• support employees to up-skill and be future ready

Despite record low unemployment, worker confidence in job security remains low, driving down engagement and productivity. Join this session for a deep dive into the findings from the People at Work 2026 study, covering 40,000 workers across six continents to understand how this sentiment influences business strategy.

Key takeaways:

• analyse the impact of job anxiety on workforce engagement, stress levels, and productivity in a climate of economic uncertainty
• evaluate the latest findings from ADP Research to understand how UK workers are faring compared to global trends and shifting work practices
• assess how worker sentiment influences leadership planning and identify ways to stabilise the talent pipeline amid rising uncertainty.

Sickness absence is at record levels, with clear consequences for productivity, morale and organisational performance. Latest CIPD/Simplyhealth research highlights the scale of the challenge facing employers. But while many organisations are strengthening absence management processes, fewer are addressing the underlying causes of ill health across the working-age population.

For people professionals, this creates a clear organisational risk and opportunity. The challenge is not simply how to manage absence more effectively, but to shift from a reactive approach to a preventative wellbeing strategy. One that improves the health of the working-age population through improved job quality, work design and health risk management, while continuing to support employees who experience genuine ill health - delivering more sustainable workforce health and performance over time.

Key takeaways:

• why absence management alone is not enough, and how prevention reduces both absence and long-term health risks
• what effective preventative wellbeing strategies look like in practice, including early intervention, workload management, and support for mental and physical health
• how to align preventative approaches with fair, consistent absence management support, sustainable attendance and performance.

Employee career development is rising up the boardroom agenda as organisations and HR leaders tackle the challenge of engaging and retaining talent. Research shows how employees strongly value growth and development, and organisations that actively connect with workers and support internal career development, see greater employee commitment and retention.

Key takeaways:

• discover how to empower your employees to drive internal career growth and what HR can do to support this
• understand how employers can engage and support internal career development to keep your workforce engaged
• utilise career development as a tool to motivate and retain talent as the workforce landscape evolves.

As working lives lengthen, organisations face a growing strategic challenge: how to keep experienced talent productive, engaged and contributing at pace. The opportunity is significant to keep experienced talent thriving – maintaining productivity, protecting critical capability and accelerating knowledge transfer. Yet CIPD research suggests that older workers are less likely to access development opportunities, even as many say they have skills that could be put to use in more demanding work.

This session explores the organisational gain of ‘age-inclusive reskilling’ and what that looks like in practice, reframing later careers as a stage where people can still grow, adapt and contribute meaningfully. We’ll examine how to create the means, space and culture for lifelong learning, and how multigenerational approaches – including mentoring, reverse mentoring and second-career pathways – can refresh skills and confidence as technology reshapes work.

Attendees will explore:

• how to reframe later-career development as a business opportunity – protecting productivity, retaining critical capability and accelerating knowledge transfer through age-inclusive reskilling
• practical ways to make lifelong learning a reality for older workers by creating the means, space and culture to learn.

In a world of constant disruption, trust has become one of the most critical, and fragile, assets in organisations. In this session Petra will tackle some of the biggest and most pressing trust challenges facing senior HR leaders today, particularly during periods of organisational change.

Drawing on her extensive experience working with leaders under pressure, Petra will explore why trust so often erodes during transformation, restructures, and cultural shifts - and what HR leaders can do to rebuild it in a way that is authentic, sustainable, and measurable. Petra will challenge traditional change management approaches, unpack the human behaviours that undermine trust, and share practical insights to help HR leaders influence from the top and support leaders through uncertainty.

Key takeaways:

• a deeper understanding of why trust breaks down during change
• practical strategies to rebuild and sustain trust
• new perspectives on the role of HR as a guardian of trust
• actionable ideas to support leaders and organisations through uncertainty.

Most companies treat engagement and performance as separate ideas. That’s a mistake. Sustainable high performance needs an engaging culture and performance confidence; for people to feel connected to the company and their work, plus belief in future success. Measure those two and you get a clear, forward‑looking read on whether your culture will deliver results. We’ll show you a simple way to measure both, identify where you are today and take practical steps to move your culture forward.

Key Takeaways:

• understand the psychological link between culture and performance 
• categorise your organisation's current culture using our framework
• understand what a holistic measurement strategy combining engagement and performance confidence really looks like

This session provides a deep dive into the mental health frameworks that drive long-term ROI. We move beyond individual "self-care" to examine the systemic changes required to mitigate workplace stress, prevent burnout, and ensure that mental wellbeing is treated as a critical business metric.

Key takeaways:

• design policies (e.g. right to disconnect and protected focus time) that integrate recovery and early intervention into the working week
• identify and address organisational stressors such as workload and job control to reduce stress and prevent burnout
• embed wellbeing as a core business metric, linking it directly to performance and ROI.

Generative AI is transforming employee relations, leading to grievances that are often lengthier and more complex. While AI can offer advantages in putting together formal complaints, it critically lacks the necessary human context, creating challenges for HR. This session will focus on how to navigate today’s complex, AI-generated grievances. Focusing on strategies to understand:

• what informal measures promote direct, fast resolution as a first step?
• how can managers be skilled to navigate and digest AI-generated complaints?
• how can formal guidelines ensure proper employee use of AI and highlight the associated risks?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is unavoidable in the modern workplace, especially agentic AI, but how organisations frame emerging technologies can change employee perception and engagement.

Key takeaways:

• what is the impact of positioning agentic AI as a digital colleague, intelligent assistant, or a straightforward tool?
• how does each positioning strategy can influence behaviour, performance and organisational culture?
• how can you introduce AI in a way that enhances collaboration, reduces resistance, and unlocks meaningful productivity gains?

This session explores how to sustain organisational success by building a continuous, positive employee journey. It focuses on the key drivers of retention (internal mobility, career development and manager effectiveness) to boost engagement, reduce voluntary turnover and strengthen the internal talent pipeline.

Key takeaways:

• understand how clear career development and skills building pathways reduce attrition and deliver ROI by lowering recruitment and replacement costs
• strategies to integrate DE&I into organisational systems to drive trust and maximise employee effort at scale
• equip managers to drive retention through effective coaching, feedback and performance focused development conversations.

In this panel session HR leaders will explore trust as a core driver of performance and productivity. Using real organisational examples, the discussion will show how trust influences engagement, decision-making, retention, and resilience during change - and why it must be built into leadership behaviours and systems, not treated as a standalone wellbeing initiative.

Key Takeaways:

• how trust directly impacts performance, productivity, and engagement
• the leadership behaviours and systems that strengthen trust at scale
• practical ways to link wellbeing investment to measurable business outcomes

Embedding an effective EDI strategy isn’t just a nice to have but a business imperative in today’s workplace. Showing a strong commitment to EDI can enable you to attract and retain talent, drive innovation and create a sense of belonging. Join this session to discover practical steps to building and implementing your EDI strategy.

Key takeaways:

• what does an effective EDI strategy look like? 
• how do you embed EDI practices into every level of the business?
• how can you track and measure the progress of your EDI objectives?
• what is the business impact of implementing an effective EDI framework?

In an era when AI and other breakthrough technologies seems to make ‘anything possible', it is even more important to  anchor on first principles when it comes to designing and delivering learning strategies. Whether this is for a single offsite for a team, or an entire learning strategy for an organisation, we will get the most from our new technologies by starting with how the brain truly learns.

This science-rich yet practical session will help talent and learning professionals to radically increase the effectiveness of learning - perhaps even by 10 times - while meaningfully lower costs.

Specifically, we will explore how to:

• Leverage first principles for learning
• Make more evidence-based choices on learning modalities such as in person versus other forms
• Maximise the potential of AI for learning
• Know when and how to involve humans in a learning process
• Design learning strategies that truly scale but still impact deeply
• All without reducing headcount on your talent and learning team

Talent challenges are increasingly interconnected, so the strategic approach needs to match. This session helps identify opportunities, align priorities, and optimise the end-to-end HR ecosystem to strengthen agility and turn disruption into action. HR faces increasingly complex challenges that are systemic - spanning culture, technology, processes, and talent. Traditional approaches often address symptoms rather than root causes.

Key takeaways: 

• how to diagnose talent gaps
• practical strategies to build a future-ready workforce
• connect initiatives across the workforce, and where to consider prioritising actions.

Employee experience today is no longer about isolated initiatives - it’s about building a cohesive, intelligent ecosystem that works for everyone. This session unpacks a modern EX playbook where simplicity reduces friction, scalability ensures consistency, and impact is measurable across the employee lifecycle. Explore how HR can move from reactive support to proactive experience design using the right blend of technology and intent.

Key Takeaways:

• learn how to simplify HR without dumbing it down
• understand how to scale experience without losing the human touch
• discover how to drive measurable impact through EX

AI coaching tools can help employees deliver on business outcomes through personalised, adaptive learning at scale, creating a more agile, skills-aligned workforce. The tools can support employees with real-time guidance, targeted development pathways, and give feedback tailored to their, and their organisations, objectives. 

Learn how AI can support L&D professionals with:

• analysing performance signals
• diagnosing skills gaps
• mapping learning recommendations directly into organisational priorities.

Organisations are operating in a state of near-constant change — increasingly unpredictable and complex. Emerging technologies, evolving workforce expectations, and shifting business models are reshaping how work gets done, placing pressure on structure, leadership and ways of working. This results in uncertainty, fatigue and resistance that slows momentum and undermines performance.

For HR, this creates critical organisational challenge. How can people professionals build an enduring organisational capacity for change? This requires shifting the narrative away from ‘change delivery’ towards developing and shaping the conditions that enable individuals, teams and organisations to absorb, adapt to and sustain with progress over time? Developing this capability is now a core part of organisational resilience and long-term success.

 Key takeaways:

• how HR can define, assess and build change readiness and change capacity at individual, team and organisational levels
• what role can HR play in reducing resistance by addressing the human factors of change, including trust, clarity and psychological safety
• practical implications for organisations managing change fatigue, competing priorities and ongoing transformation agendas.

This session explores how organisations embed inclusion, diversity and equity as a core cultural standard, moving beyond compliance to create trust, belonging and stronger business outcomes.

Key takeaways:

• evidence based strategies for linking belonging initiatives directly to measurable gains in employee retention and performance
• cultural standards, systems and leadership behaviours drive trust and discretionary effort at scale
• practical actions to address bias and build an equitable, high performing workplace.

This session focuses on how managerial behaviour shapes day-to-day wellbeing, motivation and engagement within teams. It explores how psychological safety, recognition and autonomy support employee confidence, innovation and healthy ways of working.

Key takeaways:

• build trust and psychological safety through inclusive management and open team dynamics
• use meaningful, ongoing recognition to strengthen motivation and connection to purpose
• support wellbeing through autonomy and compassionate, practical conversations.

Effective performance management is essential to driving business performance - with leaders sitting at the heart of this. Explore how leadership and performance management go hand-in-hand in driving business outcomes.

Key takeaways:

• effectively communicate objectives and targets to enable employees to achieve business objectives
• understand what motivates your employees and empowering them to tackle decisions that are new, big and challenging
• foster cultures of continuous learning to encourage skill development and innovation.

TUPE compliance is non-negotiable, and managing the people transition minimises risk and preserves value. This session will guide you in managing this process, focusing on how to support employees and position yourself as a strategic HR leader. Discover how to ensure a seamless transition.

Key takeaways:

• gain knowledge on legal compliance and risk mitigation 
• how to manage the M&A process and identify affected employees
• the practical steps to transferring contracts, terms and continuity of employment.

Benefits provided to employees play such a huge part in a total remuneration package, it's imperative that HR functions are aware of the changes being made to payrolling benefits in kind, which is being mandated from April 2027.

Payrolling may be in the title of this UK wide change, but HR functions, systems / technology, and the data held by employers will have a big role to play in the successful role out of this policy mandate.

Join this session to know:

• What the changes are which you need to be aware of

• What proactive steps you can take to get ahead of the curve in data gathering, and software requirements

• How you can ensure your workforce are aware of the changes.

Join Tim Harford OBE, renowned Economist, BBC presenter, Financial Times columnist and best selling author for a sharp, insightful look at the forces reshaping the world of work. 

Blending economics, psychology and human behaviour, Tim explores how innovation happens, what crises teach us about leadership, and how to build resilient, adaptable organisations. He cuts through noise and misinformation to reveal how better use of data and a smarter relationship with AI can transform decision-making, culture and performance.