Welcome & Opening Remarks

Kick off the 2026 HRPA Summit: The Human Advantage with a meaningful opening that sets the stage for a day of learning, connection, and inspiration. The program begins with a Land Acknowledgement and Indigenous performance, followed by welcome remarks from HRPA leadership, sponsor recognition, and special greetings from our Title Sponsor and government representatives.

Hosted by London emcee Jesse Lipscombe. 

Today’s workplaces are facing growing pressure to support employee mental health and wellbeing, while HR professionals are increasingly expected to act as strategists, coaches, crisis responders, culture leaders, and emotional support systems all at once. As expectations continue to rise, many organizations are considering how they can create psychologically healthy workplaces without placing the entire responsibility on HR.

This session explores a practical and sustainable approach to Psychological Health and Safety (PHS) that moves beyond theory and into real-world workplace application. Grounded in the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace, participants will learn how resilient organizations are built not only through individual coping strategies, but through leadership behaviours, team dynamics, and organizational systems that distribute responsibility more effectively across the workplace.

The session begins by framing resilience and distinguishing between individual resiliency and collective resiliency. Participants will explore how workplace environments either strengthen or undermine resilience and why sustainable wellbeing cannot rely solely on employees “managing stress better.”

Speaker: Sara Hopkins

When Workplace Culture Becomes a Legal Risk

Workplace culture is no longer just a leadership aspiration. It is a business risk, governance issue, and organizational responsibility. Attendees will examine the links between culture, duty of care, legal liability, and reputational risk, gaining a clearer understanding of executive accountability in creating sustainable workplaces. This session sets the stage for deeper conversations about belonging and culture by highlighting the very real operational consequences of workplace culture decisions. 

The real advantage in today’s workplaces isn’t strategy or technology, it’s how we design inclusive spaces for the people who will drive that strategy or leverage that technology. In many workplaces, inclusion remains disconnected from core systems, showing up in values and commitments but not fully reflected in policies, processes, and decisions. Without intentional human design and influence, inequities remain and belonging is experienced unevenly across groups.

In this keynote, Rumina Morris challenges HR professionals to move beyond inclusive intention and into meaningful action by asking key questions that inform and guide their work. Using a human-centred lens, she explores how HR is uniquely positioned to influence the systems that shape workplace culture, employee experience, and sustainable outcomes.

Participants will be guided through a structured reflection to assess how inclusion currently shows up across their organization, and what it takes to move toward more principled, consistent, and accountable practices. With a focus on application, this session equips participants with practical ways to support employees, leaders, and each other in strengthening inclusion and belonging in the workplace.

Speaker: Rumina Morris

Time to recharge, connect, and reflect.

Just Because Technology Can, Doesn’t Mean Organizations Should

As technology continues to reshape the workplace, leaders face an increasingly important question: just because technology can do something, does it mean organizations should? This Human Advantage Moment explores the intersection of ethics, trust, technology, and human capability, challenging leaders to consider their responsibility in shaping the future of work. Through discussions on AI governance, workplace surveillance, digital trust, cognitive overload, and ethical innovation, attendees will examine how organizations can balance technological advancement with human judgment. This session serves as a critical bridge between conversations on belonging, psychological safety, and future workforce strategy, reinforcing the role of leadership in ensuring technology enhances rather than diminishes the human experience at work. 

Every HR conference right now has an AI session. This isn’t that session.

Most conversations about AI in HR swing between breathless excitement about what’s coming and quiet anxiety about what it means for the people in the room. Neither one actually helps you walk back into your organization on Monday and do something differently.

This session starts somewhere different: with you.

The HR professionals in this room sit at the epicenter of every major force reshaping the workplace culture, trust, inclusion, psychological safety, workforce planning, and leadership. That was true before AI, and it is even more true now. The question isn’t whether AI is changing HR. It’s whether HR is going to lead that change or be led by it.

The skills that make great HR professionals great, the ability to read a room, hold complexity, navigate ethics, build trust across difference, and make judgment calls that no data set can make are not being replaced. They are becoming rarer, more valuable, and more necessary than ever. The risk isn’t that AI takes your seat at the table. The risk is that HR professionals who haven’t developed a strategic relationship with AI will find themselves a step behind those who have.

This session is for the doers, the managers, directors, and individual contributors who will go back to their organizations and figure out what this means in practice: for hiring, for people strategy, for culture, and for the way work gets done.

You’ll leave with a new perspective on your role in an AI-shaped workplace and at least one question you’ll still be asking yourself long after the session is over.

Speaker: Limor Markman

The Skills Crisis Isn't About Skills

Future readiness depends on more than training programs alone. Organizations that thrive will be those that create the capacity, support, and culture needed for continuous learning and adaptability.

As organizations prepare for an increasingly complex future, workforce readiness has become about more than closing skills gaps. Success depends on an organization's ability to create the conditions that enable people to learn, adapt, and grow continuously.

This session explores the connection between workforce agility, organizational capacity, and sustainable performance. Attendees will examine how factors such as workload, change fatigue, and cognitive overload can impact learning, adaptability, and long-term workforce resilience.

As workforce expectations, business needs, and skill requirements continue to evolve, organizations must rethink how they attract, develop, and deploy talent. This forward-looking session explores the shift to a skills-based economy, the growing importance of talent mobility, and new approaches to workforce planning that build organizational agility. Leaders will challenge outdated talent practices, examine where HR should stop investing time and resources, and identify the strategic bets that will position their organizations for long-term success. Attendees will leave with practical insights on building a more adaptable, resilient, and future-ready workforce. 

Why Employees Stop Believing Leaders

Why are employees increasingly skeptical of organizational messages, change initiatives, and leadership promises? This Human Advantage Moment explores the growing disconnect between what organizations say and what employees experience. Examining themes of trust erosion, change fatigue, communication overload, leadership credibility, and organizational integrity, this session uncovers the emotional realities driving employee skepticism. Attendees will gain insight into why trust is harder to build, easier to lose, and more critical than ever in times of constant change. This conversation challenges leaders to consider how authenticity, consistency, and action shape employee belief and engagement.

Session description and speaker to be announced.  

Let the DJ set re-energize you by blending music and movement for a mid-afternoon reboot.

What the Four-Day Workweek Reveals About Human Performance in the AI Age

As organizations navigate rapid workplace change, leaders are being challenged to rethink long-held assumptions about productivity, performance, and how work gets done. In this closing session, four-day workweek pioneer Joe O’Connor and future-of-work journalist Jared Lindzon — co-authors of Do More in Four: Why It's Time for a Shorter Workweek — explore what the global four-day workweek movement reveals about psychological safety, innovation, sustainable performance, and the future of human-centred work.
Drawing on research, reporting, and work with organizations across multiple continents, Joe and Jared challenge outdated ideas about time, efficiency, and “performative busyness” in today’s workplace. They make the case that the organizations best positioned to thrive through disruption and technological change will not be those that simply do the same work faster, but those that redesign work to create greater trust, adaptability, creativity, and capacity for people to do their best work.
Delegates will leave with practical insights on building healthier, more resilient organizations by creating the time and space people need to learn, experiment, collaborate, and evolve in a rapidly changing world.

Fireside chat with Jared Lindzon and Joe O'Connor

Leading with Impact in a Changing Landscape

Leadership today is being tested by constant change, rising complexity, technological disruption, and uncertainty about the future. In this environment, the best leaders do more than manage risk. They expand possibility. They help people see beyond current limits, move with confidence, and believe that something better can be built together. In this high-energy and motivational keynote, bestselling author and leadership expert, our keynote speaker makes the case that hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is a strategy. It is one of the most powerful forces leaders can use to create clarity, build trust, sustain momentum, and inspire meaningful action in a changing world. As organizations navigate the growing tension between technological advancement and human connection, this session challenges audiences to think bigger, lead with courage, and harness the uniquely human capacities that drive progress forward. Blending research, storytelling, and practical leadership tools, our keynote speaker shows how hopeful leaders help people act as one, stay focused on the long term, and go beyond the norm to create lasting impact.

Who's closing out the Summit? Stay tuned for our keynote speaker reveal.

DJ weaves the day’s insights into a live musical reflection.

Mix and mingle at this reception with peers, speakers, and industry leaders during an evening of connection, reflection, and shared insight.