2026 Program
Monday, November 9
5:00 - 6:30 PM
Welcome Reception
Tuesday, November 10
8:00 AM
Registration Opens + Breakfast
9:00 AM
Welcome Remarks & Announcements
Emcee: Cheryl Cybulski | Senior Manager, Human Capital Workforce Transformation, Deloitte Consulting, LLP; President of Northwest Compensation and Rewards Forum
9:15 AM
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In today’s fast-paced world of compensation, benefits, and total rewards, resilience isn’t optional—it’s essential. This practical, energizing keynote equips you with simple, evidence-based tools to stay focused, adaptable, and steady under pressure so you can lead with clarity and sustain your impact.
Key Takeaways:
Build personal and team resilience with practical, science-backed strategies
Model calm, compassionate leadership during high-pressure moments
Develop personalized tools to stay focused, adaptable, and energized long after the session ends
Hannah Austin | Chief Executive Officer and Author, She Shatters LLC
10:00 AM
Break
10:00 AM
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Total rewards leaders are being asked to solve more complex problems than ever: shifting employee expectations, AI disruption, pay transparency, new compliance demands, and pressure to prove business value. This session explores how an innovation mindset can help rewards professionals move beyond activity and program design to outcomes that employees, leaders, and organizations actually value. Through practical stories and simple frameworks, participants will learn how to spot friction, define the outcome that matters, test small, and drive adoption — because in total rewards, value is only created when change becomes behavior.
David Mitchell | Senior Career Consultant, HR Transformation, Mercer
Presented by:
10:30 AM
Breakout Sessions
Total Rewards Track
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Performance management provides a critical link between total rewards programs and overall organizational success. This link is most effective when performance management approaches are intentionally aligned with business priorities and supported by total rewards strategies that are clear, equitable, and meaningful to the workforce. When alignment is strong, performance management can reinforce desired behaviors, support employee engagement, and help organizations attract, motivate, and retain talent.
Serilda Summers-McGee | CEO and Founder, Workplace Change
Compensation Track
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To shape the future of work, we must rethink the boundaries between compensation and talent development. Though both aim to drive business success and elevate employee experience, they often operate in silos. In this session, we’ll explore what happens when leaders connect rewards and talent strategies to unlock greater impact. Do performance management and pay cycles align? Is your career framework fueling growth for high-potential talent? It’s time to challenge conventional models and design a connected approach that accelerates development, strengthens succession, and drives results.
Denise Liebetrau | Founder & Principal Compensation Consultant, Prosper Consulting
Benefits Track
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Washington Saves is a new state-facilitated retirement savings program scheduled to open in July 2027. Certain employers will be required by law to make the program available to their employees if they don’t offer a qualified retirement plan. See if the mandate applies to your business by visiting www.wasaves.com.
The program offers an easy-to-use experience for both employers and employees. Simply register, update employees, and set up payroll contributions. Washington Saves takes care of the rest.
What employers should know:
• No employer fees
• No employer contributions
• No fiduciary liability for employers
• A private company manages investments, with oversight from a public Governing Board.
• Employees control their own accounts and can opt out anytime
Why the state created Washington Saves:
More than 1.2 million Washingtonians do not have a way to save for retirement through work. Washington Saves gives people access to portable Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) funded through automatic payroll contributions.
Jonathan Herrera | Washington Saves Program Manager, Washington Saves Program - Washington State Department of Financial Institutions
11:45 AM
Lunch
12:45 PM
Breakout Sessions
Total Rewards Track
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As AI has rapidly spread to every field of endeavor and been positioned as the future cure-all, the marketing pitch of AI “solutions” is often outrunning the solution itself. Much of the newly-labeled “AI” is a relabeling of automated data methodologies that have existed for decades, with mixed success. And like methodological predecessors, understanding how AI treats data is essential to understand the answers it may be providing.
Addressing the high-level 4 gating issues of AI – compliance, privacy, security, and access – will be dictated by the CIO/CISO/CAIO, but the operational compensation professional faces the next-level data issues - bias, interpretation, transparency, presentation, and ethics.
The speaker, an AI-certified compensation expert witness and consultant, will provide the audience with an overview of the multiple methodologies underlying the proliferation of the “AI” label and an understanding of how the application of these to compensation data and analysis can help, or hurt, reaching meaningful and valid conclusions about market compensation data and practices.
Attendees will participate in a simplified example of how AI handles compensation datasets to answer a question – we might explore pay for NFL quarterbacks.
Addition of other panel members is welcomed and encouraged to provide a multi-faceted view of the issues and lively discussion.
Fred Whittlesey | Founder and Principal Consultant, Compensation Venture Group
Compensation Track
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Many sales compensation plans fail - not because of bad intent - but because of inexperience and preventable mistakes. Join this session for three key takeaways:
1. Learn why many sales compensation programs fail
2. Get exposed to the "Deadly Sins" of why and how these sales comp programs and plans fail
3. Acquire an overview and understanding of what great sales comp gets right.
Bob Cartwright | President and CEO, Intelligent Compensation LLC
Benefits Track
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The paperwork was perfect, the leave was compliant, and the employee returned on schedule. Then, three months later, they resigned.
This is the 90-Day Retention Trap, and it happens because HR cannot be in the room for the hundreds of micro-transitions that occur across the three phases of leave: Preparing, During, and Returning. But managers are already there and need to know what to do.
In this session, we move beyond HR as the "24/7 leave concierge" to show how NIH-funded, evidence-based manager training turns supervisors into proactive retention partners. Through clear frameworks, just-in-time tools, and defined touchpoints across each phase, managers take ownership of the leave and return experience, reducing HR admin burden while dramatically improving engagement and company culture.
Attendees will leave with a scalable, manager-centric model they can implement immediately, transforming leave from a compliance checklist into one of their most powerful talent retention strategies.
Amy Beacom, EdD | Founder & CEO, Center for Parental Leave Leadership
2:00 PM
Break
2:30 PM
Breakout Sessions
Total Rewards Track
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Today’s hiring system isn’t working candidates are ignored, recruiters are overwhelmed, and organizations face longer, costlier, and less effective hiring processes. Drawing on interviews across the workforce ecosystem, work futurist Josh Levine explores how AI has amplified existing dysfunction driven by misaligned incentives, risk aversion, and declining trust.
Based on insights from his podcast The Job Market Sht Show*, this talk examines what it feels like to operate inside today’s hiring landscape and why confidence, clarity, and connection have eroded. Rather than offering quick fixes, Josh challenges leaders to rethink what hiring is truly optimizing for—and what a more intentional future could look like.
Josh Levine | Author, Educator, and Advocate for a Better Work Future
Compensation Track
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How are leading organizations adapting their remote and hybrid work policies and compensation strategies in today's dynamic employment landscape? Join compensation leaders from Deloitte as we explore recent workplace flexibility survey data and how your peers are approaching related challenges in the current environment.
Dayna Provitt, EdD, MBA, CCP, SPHR | Sr Manager - Human Capital Consulting, GPS - State, Local, and Higher Ed, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Jim Bagley | Manager, Strategy, Growth & Transformation, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Benefits Track
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Join this session to get introduced to core themes like belief recoding, somatic breathing, nervous system biology and quick mediational exercises. Attendees will learn the difference between feeling calm, and having a calm nervous system.
Natalie J Bendza | Coach/Author, The Human Forcefield, LLC
3:45 PM
Break
4:15 PM
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How does your brain work? How do you prepare it to function well? In this session we’ll explore ways to train your brain to focus and develop skills to cope when things go wrong. These strategies will help you improve and protect your mental focus so you can keep your brain in the game even when you’re overwhelmed and feeling stress. You’ll leave with practical skills you can put to use immediately.
Porter Knight | Owner, Porter Knight, LLC
5:00 PM
Closing Remarks
Emcee: Cheryl Cybulski | Senior Manager, Human Capital Workforce Transformation, Deloitte Consulting, LLP; President of Northwest Compensation and Rewards Forum