The Employee Experience Conference

Today’s comms and HR professionals face constant disruption — from rapid organizational changes to economic uncertainty and evolving employee expectations. In this keynote, you’ll learn practical, tactical strategies for keeping the rollercoaster on track: clear, steady communication that boosts morale, motivation and productivity. Buckle up and get inspired by real stories and lessons learned from a transformational leader who has weathered the ups and downs of today’s unpredictable world. This energizing opening keynote will set the tone and leave you with the tools you need, no matter what comes next.

Getting leadership buy-in for culture initiatives, including social impact programs, can be difficult. The key is to tie it to your company’s purpose, which will drive measurable results, align with business goals, and withstand leadership turnover. In this session, you’ll hear from a communications leader who has scaled impact efforts from local outreach to influencing over a billion lives — all by embedding purpose into their organization’s culture, not a side initiative. You’ll learn:

• Operational Excellence: Strategies to develop the right team structure and reporting cadences to ensure programs meet employee and community expectations.
• Performance-Driven Impact: Techniques for setting measurable goals that show how purpose connects to both business culture and community outcomes.
• Foundation for Success: How to align your social impact strategy with company culture and business goals to secure executive support and internal participation. 
• Scale and Sustain: How to evolve and grow your efforts through leadership changes, shifting employee priorities, and external headwinds.

Shifting consumer demands, internal restructures and geographic divides are reshaping how organizations connect and communicate with very different associates. But you don’t need to be the top decision-maker to lead with cultural awareness and influence. In this session with The Home Depot’s senior internal communications leaders, you’ll explore what it means to show up as a culture-centered leader, someone who bridges perspectives, reads the rooms across multiple stakeholder groups, and builds plans of action that drives meaningful behavior change while staying true to your values. Walk away with strategies to navigate complex cultural dynamics during transformative change and help your organization stay grounded, values-driven and aligned.  You’ll learn: 

• Cultural Fluency: How to build communication and programmatic frameworks that drive "stickiness" with different stakeholder groups from senior leaders to office workers, to frontline associates.  
• Spot the Friction: Assessment processes you can use to identify potential points of disconnect and resistance when communicating change or introducing new processes.
• Bridging Regional Divides: Practical strategies on how to create moments and messaging to break down the “us vs. them” barriers and unify company culture during times of uncertainty. 
• The Culture Package: Communication tactics to remain empathetic in your messaging and data-driven approaches that drive incremental and lasting change while remaining grounded in organizational values.

According to the 2025 Ragan Communications Benchmark Survey, 63% of communicators say fragmented employee experiences are their top challenge — but the bigger challenge may be the moving target of executive expectations, especially with AI tools and platforms providing real time metrics. As business goals shift, so do the KPIs internal teams are expected to hit — from sentiment and engagement to retention and productivity. Join your peers as they share how they’ve pivoted away from legacy goals and anecdotal wins to align with what matters most to the C-suite today. You’ll hear how they’re redefining influence, tracking the right metrics, and building the business case for sustained investment in employee experience. You’ll learn:

• Alignment Over Anecdotes: How teams across the employee experience are adapting to shifting executive priorities and aligning their goals to new business outcomes.
• Apply Design Thinking: Using human-centered design to identify experience gaps and build solutions tied to C-suite expectations.
• Data into Influence: Insights on connecting engagement, sentiment, and retention data to the KPIs your executive team actually values.
• Building Credibility and Trust: Communication strategies that build trust with leadership and reinforce EX as a driver of business performance.
• Age of AI: Turn data into real-time reports to meet leadership expectations and deliver the metrics executives can act on.

Airstream is known worldwide for craftsmanship and adventure, but what’s it like behind the factory doors? Brittany Fullenkamp shares how she helped translate a beloved brand into a living, breathing employee experience. From launching a purpose-built intranet to partnering with HR and leadership to elevate communication across all levels, this session explores how brand values can fuel real cultural momentum — and how internal comms can be the engine that drives it.

When layoffs, M&As, or corporate restructures hit, employees are flooded with questions and fears, while leaders scramble to preserve trust and momentum. In these moments, communications become a lifeline to handle shifting employee mindsets. Drawing from personal experience on both sides of the table, a leader driving restructuring decisions and as an employee impacted by them, you’ll learn the lessons and hard-earned strategies for navigating the realities of change. This presentation and audience-driven conversation will inspire you to confidently lean into chaos and lead proactively through uncertainty. You’ll learn: 

• Proactive Comms Strategies: How to design transparent communication plans that give employees early awareness of organizational changes, with clear guidance on messaging, timing and available resources to include for employee support.  
• Balance the Messaging: Best practices on communicating the tough realities of business decisions while still reinforcing purpose, vision and values to maintain employee trust and continued commitment. 
• Support Teams through Transition: Strategies for addressing employees thoughtfully while maintaining cultural consistency even after an organizational shake-up.  
• Real Talk: Bring your burning questions to this safe space if you are looking for advice and insights from your peers and fellow-thought leaders in the room.

In our closing peer-to-peer interactive session, our facilitator will lead the discussion around the previous fireside chat. You’ll share at your table what’s working, where there’s room for improvement, and how you’re helping to develop your own company culture. getting the most out of your existing tech stack. Walk away with fresh, crowd-sourced ideas to help you build a more connected, inclusive employee experience.

Shifting an organization from “we’ve always done it this way” to one that’s future-ready takes more than new tools - it requires a new mindset.  In this candid conversation, hear from a Chief Communications Officer who is driving transformation inside a 134-year-old company known for its proud heritage and deeply committed, long-tenured workforce. She’ll share how she’s built on that strong foundation to evolve long-standing processes, modernize communication channels, and inspire her team to challenge the status quo, embrace curiosity and take a forward-looking approach to work.

A fascinating real-world case study highlighting the advantages of an inter-disciplinary research approach to employee engagement. This approach marries consumer marketing methodologies and thinking with existing organizational research to better understand the employee experience. For over three decades, Olson Zaltman has worked with the world’s largest brands to uncover the hidden drivers behind consumer behavior. We have tapped a novel approach to employee experience that draws from our deep understanding of the human experience, allowing you to better understand the true drivers, barriers and motivators of your employees.

• Level up your engagement surveys by implementing tried and true techniques within the world of market research that can be applied to uncover how your employees really feel.
• Learn where behavior originates and what factors best predict how employees will behave in the future.

Elevating Executive Voices: Communication Strategies that Build Trust and Connection through Uncertainty

Communication professionals serve as trusted advisors, helping leaders find the right words, tone, and timing to connect with employees. But in environments marked by rapid change, balancing executive positioning with employee and stakeholder needs requires mutual trust and strategic partnership. In this session, an executive communications partner shares how she strategies and connects with her executive leadership team. Additionally, how she has built a relationship rooted in trust and influence, and how that foundation has helped them lead through complexity with clarity and confidence. You’ll learn:

• Crafting Trusted Leadership Messages: What makes executive communications resonate and how to design messages that reflect both leadership’s intent and employee needs.
• Reaching Every Audience: Channel and format guidance to engage remote, frontline, and global employees and stakeholders, ensuring messages are heard and felt across the organization.
• Communicating Through Complexity: Approaches for helping leaders navigate sensitive announcements or crisis moments with clarity, empathy, and composure.
• Coaching Executives: Tips on preparing leaders for challenging conversations, public forums, and employee engagements, helping them lead with confidence and connection.
• Bringing Leadership Voices to Life: Techniques to capture your leaders’ unique tone while keeping messages aligned with company purpose and values

The employee experience isn’t static and can be challenging to keep human, relevant and connected, especially in a world where change is hitting organizations internally and externally. In your final peer-to-peer session, you’ll have one final conversation with your table mates about the top learnings of the event. Be prepared to share out to the entire room about what is shifting within your organizations and how you are adapting to change.

Better emails = better employee experience. In this session, we’ll share five data-backed email tactics that help you personalize content, boost engagement and actually reach employees where they are. From subject lines to segmentation, you’ll walk away with quick wins you can start using right away.

According to the latest Ragan Benchmark Communications Survey, 72% of communicators adopted or updated at least one tool in the past year. From intranets to AI integrations, even the best platforms can fall flat without the right strategy to support rollout, training, and daily workflows. This panel will take you from onboarding to offboarding, as leaders share how they’ve audited, optimized, and aligned their tech stacks to improve workflows and employee engagement. You’ll learn:

• Audit for Adoption and Usage: Evaluation methods to assess your tech stack against employee and department workflows.
• Tools for Education: Strategies to embed ongoing training into daily workflows and drive adoption of new technologies and processes.
• AI Adding Value: From automating tasks to personalizing internal communications, explore smart, value-driven use cases for AI integrations.
• What Goes, What Stays: Tips for scaling your tech stack as needs evolve, while continuing to support a diverse, distributed workforce.
• Learn from the Experts: The stories of what worked (and what didn’t), and how teams pivoted to maintain seamless workflows.

LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report states 94% of employees would stay longer at a company that invests in their career development. While learning and development is proven driver of success, teams driven by quotas and short-term results often view L&D as a distraction, not a priority.  This session provides action-based strategies for promoting L&D for all employees, regardless of career stage. What works for early-career employees may not work for senior management, and this session explores how to bridge those gaps to increase L&D engagement throughout your organization. You’ll learn:

• L&D that Sticks: Upskilling Without Disruption Connect your L&D strategy to individual motivations and organizational goals to ensure relevance, buy-in, and business impact
• The Growth Engine: Embedding Micro-Learning to Drive Real Impact  Deliver bite-sized, actionable learning through platforms your team already uses, supporting real-time performance with timely, relevant resources in the moment of need
• Retention Starts Here: Making L&D a Reason to Stay  Use clear messaging, shared goals, and flexible formats to unite intergenerational teams and engage learners across all age groups.

Intranets often become outdated repositories—especially in complex organizations where people and workplace content are scattered across platforms. Uber faced this challenge firsthand , with two legacy sites, inconsistent documentation, and a hybrid workforce navigating evolving workplace norms.  Sound relatable?

Join a member of Uber’s Global Workplace Communications team while she shares how the organization consolidated content, simplified navigation, and embedded AI-powered search to create a centralized intranet experience designed to meet employees where they are—making it easier to navigate the workplace and access critical information about people and places during a time of ongoing change and hybrid work evolution.

You’ll learn:

• The Uber Intranet Journey
   A real-world case study of how we moved from fragmented systems to a unified, employee-centered intranet—with a focus on workplace and location-based content to guide employees through their in-office experience.
• Building Around Employee Needs
   How we shifted from structure-first to search-first thinking, using building user guides and keyword optimization to create a single source of truth for each office.
• The Role of AI in Findability
   Why removing the category menu and prioritizing AI-powered search improved discoverability and reduced friction in accessing essential information.
• Employee Feedback & Reaction
   What we learned from how employees actually interact with intranet content—and how that feedback reshaped our priorities.
• A Playbook for Change
   The practical steps and key decisions that helped us transform our intranet—offering a roadmap others can follow to drive operational clarity and employee connection.
• Defining Success
   How we’re measuring impact using search analytics, engagement metrics, and feedback loops—and how those insights guide continuous improvement.

Even as employees continue to look for more connections at work, ERG growth is slowing during a time when employees what more, not less. According to the 2025 Ragan Benchmark Report, 48% of organizations plan no change to their ERG commitments this year, and ERG expansion has dropped by 5%. The challenge? Without leadership support and alignment to DEI and compliance priorities, ERGs can lose momentum. This session will highlight how one organization secured a dedicated budget, gained executive champions, and built ERG programs that reflect their people and their business priorities. You’ll learn: 

• Structure Strategies: Design an ERG model that balances employee passion with business priorities while staying within compliance requirements. 
• Representation that Fits: Keep ERG groups activated and healthy, the resources and tools you can use to identify leaders within each group. 
• ERG Longevity: Strategies to keep groups active and responsive to evolving employee needs that reinforce the importance of ERGs to your employer brand.  
• Continued Investment: Make the data make sense to leadership teams and how to report ERG value in terms of recruitment, engagement, inclusion and retention for continued budgetary support.