The past few years have highlighted the importance of the mental health of our people more than ever before. However, there’s so much more work to be done in creating psychologically safe workplaces that empower our employees to better maintain their wellbeing, while also driving strong business performance.

Our leaders play a pivotal role in setting the tone for the organisation, and in this exclusive Keynote, we’ll hear from Prudence Pitter, Global Head of HR, for Automotive & Manufacturing and HCLS, at Amazon Web Services (US) as she shares the work she’s done and continue to do with leaders, to normalise the role and importance of employee wellbeing.

Prudence will share how she helps leaders to role model behaviours that make a real difference to their people, lead and navigate difficult conversations, and create a culture that empowers its people to prioritise their wellbeing, while improving organisational success.

Innovation does not occur by accident. It’s practiced, purposeful and engineered. Building an innovation mindset is a deliberate process that requires intention and effort. It involves fostering a disciplined and practiced approach that begins with inspired individuals. When large organisations prioritise creating such a culture, they encourage employees to engage in the process of generating innovative solutions for the toughest challenges they face.

Join Mike Bollinger as he outlines 5 key ingredients to foster innovation and agility in all of your teams. Each of the blueprint’s 5 elements can be strengthened by integrating high-performing skillsets, focused investments, and targeted programs. While these elements may vary in maturity levels, together they provide a multi-year roadmap for cultivating an innovation culture to drive your organisation’s success.

In today’s rapidly evolving workplace landscape, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become imperative for HR leaders seeking to optimise their operations and drive strategic organisational outcomes. Spanning talent attraction to workforce planning and employee sentiment analysis, the implications of AI could be enormous. But as HR leaders, most of us are not yet touching the sides.

In this session, we’ll hear from one seasoned HR leader as they share how they’re experimenting with the use of AI to drive greater efficiency and productivity throughout their function, and the impact that’s having on their contribution to the wider organisation.

We’ll explore how we can streamline the recruitment process from writing job descriptions, reviewing applications and identifying what the ideal candidate looks like for specific roles, to automating rostering and workforce planning and garnering insights from the voice of the employee.

The session also sheds light on the essential skill sets HR leaders must cultivate, including prompt writing, to harness the full potential of Gen-AI, and some of the critical challenges and pitfalls we need to be aware of, such a mitigating potential biases embedded in algorithms and the barriers around data security, as we navigate the ethical considerations and strategies to ensure fairness and inclusivity in AI-powered HR practices.

Employers across all industries face daunting talent challenges: high employee disengagement and turnover, acute talent shortages, and rising labour costs, to name just a few. Without the aid of technology, these challenges are magnified. However, many HR software solutions are not fit-for-purpose and fail to deliver what’s required – especially for employers with frontline and flexible workforces. In this session, Humanforce’s CEO, Clayton Pyne, chats with Cleo Rowley, Executive Director, People & Culture at Only About Children, about her organisation’s quest to streamline HR operations and enhance the employee experience with the aid of technology.

It’s an interesting time for the people and culture function – there’s more variety than ever before in how, when and where people choose to work; we’re experiencing a more diverse, multi-generational workforce with an aging population coupled with an increase in Gen Z employees; and prioritising the mental health and wellbeing of our people has never been more important. But it’s easy to get lost in all the noise about what we should be doing, so what do we need to do to rediscover who we are as an organisation, define our voice as an employer, and determine what’s right for our people?

In this panel discussion, we’ll be joined by seasoned HR leaders who will come together to share and explore how they’re working to leverage evidence-based HR, to find out what’s important to their people and focus their HR strategies on the things that matter. We’ll delve into how we should create a people strategy that aligns with what our people and our organisation need, and how by leveraging continuous listening techniques, we can create an engaging employee experience that speaks to everyone in the business and measure the effectiveness of those EX initiatives.

Faced with increasingly aggressive customers and greater regulatory responsibilities these are challenging times for HR teams and workforce they support.

“VR & AR lets you; See it. Try it. Know it. And respond…”

While the effectiveness of VR and AR immersive learning is well documented, and usage continues to grow, many organisations are still grappling with how to integrate it into their business.

Meanwhile, Safe Work Australia reports that mental injury claims have increased 36% in the past 7 years accounting for 9% of all workers compensation claims, with payments 3 times greater than that of all physical injuries and illnesses.

Faced with these societal and commercial challenges, this session will use a range of client examples to explore the how organisations can build VR & AR immersive learning solutions that support their workforce and deliver measurable ROI.

Through a live VR demonstration, the audience will see the Learner completing various 360° video scenarios. The session will also outline the Principals of Immersive Learning, how to overcome internal barriers to entry, and illustrate how VR and AR can build teams’ adaptive thinking; as well as generate knowledge that sticks through process-based simulations.

It will also cover how and where, AI best fits within immersive learning, and conclude with a case study on Woolworths VR training program, focusing on their module Customer Acts of Violence & Aggression.

ECMS manages a constantly changing shift-based workforce in a highly competitive labour market with tight margins. Against a decade of underinvestment in HR systems, Stu Braganza-Travis presented his people technology business case to the board in 2023. It was the single biggest investment the organisation had ever considered. It also was the easiest, fastest decision they have ever made!

“In early childhood services, if you can’t manage, attract and secure the talent, you can’t run the business. We needed systems to better manage our carers, teachers and classroom allocations, but we also had to tackle our talent attraction and retention issues. We were juggling daily operational challenges alongside long term strategic imperatives.”
Stu has a breadth of executive experience, but the one constant throughout his career is a belief that healthy, happy and talented people are what makes organisations succeed – therefore elevating and integrating the ‘people strategy’ as the organisational strategy is a no-brainer.

Please join us for an engaging Q&A panel discussion where you’ll learn the value of:
• Scoping the project to tackle tactical and strategic challenges in parallel
• Crafting a ‘Business’ Case NOT ‘HR’ Case for People Tech Transformation

There’s no denying that the rapid developments in AI will have an enormous impact, both in how we operate as a HR function, and on the broader organisation and workforce. For forward-thinking businesses that get ahead of the game, there is enormous potential to capitalise on the opportunities presented by the AI era.

In this HUDDLE, we’ll have the opportunity to explore and discuss how we as HR leaders should be thinking about in developing a workforce strategy that sets us up for success amid rapid developments in AI, from identifying the new and evolving roles in our organisations, the capability mix to support our goals as an AI-driven organisation, and the reskilling and talent attraction efforts required to meet those needs.

Today’s employers face a critical opportunity to reshape the future of work. Success hinges on striking a delicate balance: maintaining agility while ensuring stability, fostering productivity alongside flexibility, and integrating efficiency with empathy.
While much of the focus is on knowledge workers, it’s crucial to acknowledge that 70-80% of the workforce operates outside traditional desk roles. We’re witnessing diverse job types, ongoing labour shortages, skill gaps, and regulatory changes—a complexity crisis impacting all levels of the organisation.

In this presentation, James Saxton, VP of Product at Dayforce, will share the latest insights from Dayforce’s global research on conquering complexity and striking a balance between seemingly competing priorities. Discover how to close the gap between the different levels in the organisation, empower managers to solve some of today’s most critical business challenges, and build a productive workforce.

In a world that is as fast-moving as ours, keeping up with the pace of change is a challenge in itself, but as HR leaders, our mission is to think ahead and create a people strategy that will set both our people and the organisation up for success in the years to come. This means anticipating critical future roles, pinpointing key skills, and investing in comprehensive upskilling initiatives. Equally crucial is developing strong leadership and fostering an inclusive workplace culture that ensures we consistently attract and retain the best talent. By strategically prioritising these areas, we establish a solid foundation for sustained growth and innovation.

We are so lucky to be joined by Yenita Oktora, CHRO of L’Oreal Indonesia, who will share her strategic insights on aligning people strategy with business growth and employee aspirations in one of the most digitally native countries in the world. She’ll shed some light on her rigorous approaches to succession planning, nurturing employee growth, and empowering future leaders while cultivating an inclusive, engaging, and psychologically safe workplace that sets the people and the organisation up to thrive in the years to come.

Is your HR tech supporting the future of your organisation?

The role of People Leaders has evolved from being “human resources” to driving transformation across the business, from employee experience and talent retention to revenue alignment, business agility, and profitability. This has had a direct impact on the requirement of HR tech – not only you do need a platform that supports the full employee journey from hire to retire, workforce planning, employee wellbeing and more, you also need the tech stack to connect to the rest of your CXO so your people data can be used to help drive effective decision making.

With the hype of GenAI, join this session to learn how to get the best out of emerging technologies without the downsides:
• Top use cases and quantifiable impact of emerging tech on HR from hire-to-retire
• Getting visibility on skills within your organisation, and aligning your people strategy to prepare for the future
• Improve employee wellbeing and reducing burnout by reducing cognitive load and increase efficiency
• AI is only as powerful as the data – learn how to get your data and systems ready in order to maximise the effect of GenAI

As the landscape of work proceeds to shift amidst the AI era, HR leaders continue to be instrumental in owning the end-to-end employee experience of their organisation to meet the growing needs of a diverse workforce. In this Keynote, join Oracle as they will delve into high-level insights on what today’s human resource leaders need to drive efficiency, and cultivate future-ready, engaged teams in ever more complex and volatile organisational landscapes.

You’ll hear from Sonia McDonald, CEO and founder of LeadershipHQ, and Bianca Vitale, People & Culture Project Manager at Planit Testing, as they discuss:
• Lead With Perspective – enabling greater collaboration to create supportive and tailored employee experiences that help people redefine what success means to them
• Power through Partnership – how top organisations are unifying resources, process and data to skyrocket productivity and empower the greatest business asset, people!
• United Leadership – how diverse viewpoints and head-heart leadership approach can unlock unprecedented employer scores and business outcomes
• Intelligent HR – How smart HR leaders are harnessing AI to turn people data into unlikely innovation, optimal performance, and measurable ROI

There’s no denying that the rapid developments in AI will have an enormous impact, both in how we operate as a HR function, and on the broader organisation and workforce. For forward-thinking businesses that get ahead of the game, there is enormous potential to capitalise on the opportunities presented by the AI era.

In this HUDDLE, we’ll have the opportunity to explore and discuss how we as HR leaders should be thinking about in developing a workforce strategy that sets us up for success amid rapid developments in AI, from identifying the new and evolving roles in our organisations, the capability mix to support our goals as an AI-driven organisation, and the reskilling and talent attraction efforts required to meet those needs.

With the gender pay gap data being made publicly available for the first time in Australia in February 2024, there is a greater focus than ever before on ensuring that all employees are fairly represented, and on identifying and addressing inequalities in our workforce. The increased transparency has given both individuals and organisations the information they need to take action and drive accountability in gender equality. But it has also sparked a discussion around how we can better measure gaps across specific roles and within industries.

This panel discussion will bring together HR leaders in the region to explore what this data actually means, and with a magnifying glass on the progress made over the next few years, how organisatons can double down on their efforts to ensure that all employees are equally valued and rewarded in their workplace.

In today’s world, as many of us navigate tighter budgets and scrutiny on ROI and our impact on business success, it’s more important than ever for HR leaders to drive increased productivity, performance and efficiency, while also being able to effectively measure and report that back to the business. But first we need to define what that productivity and measurement looks like, both within our HR functions themselves and across the wider organisation.

In this presentation, we’ll hear from we’ll hear from Alana Shephard, Head of People Performance at Tyro Payments as she how they’re rethinking what it means to unlock high performance within their organisation. They’ll share how they champion the mindset of HR being a suite of products or experiences that allow our customers, people and leaders to engage with in order to perform better in a holistic sense; in terms of wellbeing, actual on-the-job performance, and how they innovate and collaborate.

They’ll also touch on their approach to performance impact, and the framework they’ve put into place to set KPIs and measure organisation-wide performance.