Time starts… now. Tech Talks opens the evening with fast-paced 10-minute product demos, held alongside welcome drinks. Sponsors take the stage to showcase their latest innovations, while delegates get a front-row look at what’s shaping the industry. When the clock runs out, so does the time.

HR has never been more strategically relevant, but having a seat at the executive table means nothing if you’re only using it to talk about people topics. The most effective HR leaders today are invested in, and accountable for, leading business strategy. This session explores how to be of best value as a business executive, and how to build the credibility, curiosity and commercial instincts that augment HR’s influence.

• Moving beyond people topics to engage meaningfully with business strategy, risk and growth
• Diagnosing organisation needs and supporting with people solutions

Psychosocial safety legislation has driven organisations to focus on risk, checklists and compliance, but the time has come to move beyond a compliance mindset and take a more holistic, unified approach. As the legislative landscape continues to evolve and the lines between HR and safety get blurred, it can be easy to get lost, but this session will explore practical ways to operationalise psychosocial safety across teams and leadership.

• Moving beyond surveys, checklists, and compliance controls to create actionable outcomes that stick
• Integrating HR and safety for a unified, organisation-wide approach
• Exploring practical strategies to leverage psychological safety for stronger team performance, productivity and engagement
• Legislative changes

The traditional career ladder is no longer fit for purpose. As roles evolve faster than frameworks can keep up, organisations need to move away from structured progression pathways and towards something more dynamic: building skills agility, harnessing emerging capabilities, and rethinking how people grow altogether. Join this session to learn how organisations are transforming growth and development pathways.

• What good development looks like when traditional pathways no longer apply
• Building internal talent pipelines and personalised development plans that prepare people for the future, not just the next role
• Understanding the nuances of developing different subsets of your workforce, e.g. the post-covid workforce

Change from now on will be continuous, interconnected and accelerating. Traditional change management thinking isn’t built for that reality. Organisations need a new model for how leaders lead through it: not just coping mechanisms, but genuine adaptive capability embedded across the enterprise. Join our expert to explore what effective leadership looks like when change is the permanent backdrop.

• Shifting from change management to adaptive leadership, and what this looks like in practice
• Building enterprise-wide capability to lead continuous change, not just respond to it
• Recognising and managing the psychosocial risks that come with ongoing transformation
• Creating the culture and behaviours that make continuous change navigable

Claims are rising. Burnout isn’t improving. People continue to leave.

Despite significant investment in wellbeing, engagement and employee experience, many organisations are still struggling to move the needle on the outcomes that matter most.

Most leaders treat these as separate workforce issues. Our research suggests there is a very clear, very real, and very costly link.

Drawing on five years of data and insights from more than 11,000 employees across Australia and New Zealand, Gallagher will share findings from our region’s largest employee wellbeing study, revealing the hidden factors driving workforce risk and performance.

Combining exclusive wellbeing research, national claims insights and global expertise spanning people strategy, workplace risk and employee benefits, we’ll uncover the patterns many organisations are missing, the cost of getting them wrong, and the opportunities hiding in plain sight.

This practical session includes a guided wellbeing audit, helping HR leaders identify risks within their own workforce and prioritise the actions most likely to improve retention, performance and wellbeing outcomes.

Leave with evidence, not theory. And practical actions, not more wellbeing rhetoric.

As AI reshapes work, leaders need to intentionally shape the culture that will support clarity, collaboration, adaptability and ethical decision-making. This session gives leaders a practical, creative and grounded way to design the behaviours and rituals that will anchor your organisation through transformation. Join to explore:

• How work redesign, AI strategy and culture all fit together
• Connecting DEI, performance and leadership into one coherent approach
• Helping leaders translate strategic intent into everyday behaviours

Leadership outcomes:

• Creating a practical method for designing culture intentionally
• Building behaviours that strengthen clarity, collaboration and adaptability
• Exploring tools for embedding new ways of working into everyday practice
• Establishing a clear link between culture, leadership and transformation

HR has never been more strategically relevant, but having a seat at the executive table means nothing if you’re only using it to talk about people topics. The most effective HR leaders today are invested in, and accountable for, leading business strategy. This session explores how to be of best value as a business executive, and how to build the credibility, curiosity and commercial instincts that augment HR’s influence.

• Moving beyond people topics to engage meaningfully with business strategy, risk and growth
• Diagnosing organisation needs and supporting with people solutions

Explore how organisations are evolving their retention strategies by understanding what drives their employees, investing in experience and being a trusted and transparent employer so you can weather market volatility. Join our expert to discuss.

• Building listening mechanisms that surface honest motivation and lead to visible action
• The role of transparency during uncertainty, and how honest communication builds trust
• Offering development pathways and creating growth that make employees feel seen
• Handling change resistance

AI is creating a huge expectation from boardrooms around increased capability, but adding AI into stale processes isn’t making a dent in workloads. As expectations increase, and people find comfort in familiar work, join our speaker to explore practical routes to process simplification to create work that is always in service of the strategy.

• Directly aligning work to strategy
• Understanding which processes need to be human-led
• Empowering employees to continuously innovate
• Understanding hidden complexities and psychosocial safety risks of new workflows
• Discussing the changing landscape of AI tokenisation and how to maximise ROI from AI

Too often, DEI initiatives stall as standalone programs rather than being embedded into the policies and practices that shape everyday working life. Without this, the link to real business results can get lost. How can HR move beyond one-off initiatives and embed DEI into the policies and practices that drive genuine, lasting impact? Join to discuss:

• What genuine, embedded DEI looks like in policy and practice
• Measuring and showcasing how DEI-driven policies and practices drive organisational performance
• Practical steps for translating DEI values into policies and practices that stick